That’s an actual stone in my yard, believe it or not, one that apparently went out of its way to anthropomorphize itself for my illustrative pleasure. If rocks can be that helpful and friendly, it gives me great hope for human beings.

Which is my subtle way of leading into asking: after these last few weeks of posts, have you started to have dreams about pitching? If they’re not nightmares, and you’re scheduled to pitch at a conference anytime soon, you’re either a paragon of mental health, a born salesperson, or simply haven’t been paying very close attention. Either that, or I’ve seriously underemphasized the potential pitfalls.

For this, our last Pitchingpalooza post, I’m going to assume that you either are waking up in the night screaming or that I haven’t yet explained the conference environment adequately. So fasten your seatbelts — I’m going to be taking you on a guided tour of false expectations, avoidable missteps, and just plain disasters.

Hey, forewarned is forearmed. Or at least less stupefied in the moment.

First-time pitchers often harbor fears of inadvertently making a poor impression upon an agent or editor in a social situation, thereby nullifying their chances of being able to wow ‘em with a pitch in a formal meeting. I wish I could say that this is an unfounded fear, but actually, it’s pretty reasonable: one doesn’t have to spend much time hanging around that bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference in North America to hear a few horror stories about jaw-droppingly rude writers.

And I don’t know about you, but one of my more dubious gifts as a human being is an uncanny ability to find the most institutionally powerful person in the room and catch him in a misstatement or crack a joke that skewers his ego, generally before I know who he is. (It’s one of the reasons I elected to leave academia, as a matter of fact, as several past presidents of the American Political Science Association know to their sorrow. Fortunately for me, the step from spotting the incorrectly-placed comma in a constitution that would result in half the population’s losing a right to editing manuscripts was a relatively small one.)

Hard to imagine how this particular trait would have provided my ancestors with enough of a survival advantage to justify its being passed down the evolutionary line, but I do seem to have been born with it. Many are the family stories about the toddler critiquing the pediatrician’s sartorial choices.

Honestly, does anybody look good in those tacky white polyester coats?

Before any of my fellow compulsive truth-tellers begin to panic, let me hasten to add that agents’ and editors’ anecdotes are almost invariably about genuinely outrageous approach attempts, not minor faux pas. And that’s not just because “You’re not going to believe this, but a pitcher just forgot to tell me whether is book is fiction or nonfiction” isn’t nearly as likely to garner sympathy from fellow bar denizens as “This insane writer just grabbed my arm as I was rushing into the bathroom and refused to stop talking for 20 minutes.”

For one thing, the former is too common a phenomenon to excite much of a response from other agents. Unfortunately, though, the latter happens often enough that some agents turn against hallway pitching for life. As, indeed, many a product of the post-conference rumor mill can attest.

However — and this is a big however — in my experience, the aspiring writers who sit around and fret about being the objects of such anecdotes are virtually never the folks who ought to be worrying about it. These are not the kind of gaffes that your garden-variety well-mannered person is likely to commit.

The result: polite people end up tiptoeing around conferences, terrified of doing the wrong thing, while the rude stomp around like Godzilla with P.M.S. And then, once an agent who has been smashed into by one Godzilla too many complains on a blog or in an interview about how impolite writers are, the naturally courteous cringe, while the rude remain unfazed. Thus are the polite rendered more and more fearful of running afoul of an unspoken rule or two.

Case in point: technologically-savvy reader wrote in last year to ask if it was considered appropriate to take notes on a laptop or Blackberry during conference seminars. It’s still not very common (surprising, given how computer-bound most of us are these days) but yes, it is acceptable, under two conditions.

First, if you do not sit in a very prominent space in the audience — and not solely because of the tap-tap-tap sound you’ll be making. Believe it or not, it’s actually rather demoralizing for a lecturer to look out at a sea of faces that are all staring at their laps.. Are these people bored out of their minds, the worried speaker wonders, or merely taking notes very intensely?

Don’t believe me? The next time you attend a lecture of any sort, keep your eyes on the teacher’s face, rather than on your notes, your Blackberry, or that Octavia Butler novel you’ve hidden in your lap because you can’t believe that your boss is making you sit through a talk on the importance of conserving paper clips for the third time this year.

I guarantee that within two minutes, the teacher will be addressing half of her comments directly to you; consistent, animated-faced attention is THAT unusual in a lecture environment. The bigger the class, the more quickly she will focus upon the one audience member who is visibly interested in what she is saying.

Heck, in the university where I used to teach, active listening was so rare that occasionally, one or another of my colleagues would get so carried away with appreciation that he would marry a particularly attentive student. One trembles to think what these men would have done had they been gripping enough lecturers to animate an entire room.

Back to the Blackberry issue. It’s also considered, well, considerate to ask the speaker before the class if it is all right to use any electronic device during the seminar, be it computer, iPhone, or tape recorder.

Why? Think about it: if your head happens to be apparently focused upon your screen, how is the speaker to know that you’re not just checking your e-mail? Also, in these decadent days, when the antics of unwary pets and clumsy humans often go viral, how may a speaker be sure that you are not recording him with an eye to posting his speech beneath unflattering lighting on YouTube?

Enough about the presenters’ problems; let’s move on to yours. Do be aware that attending a conference, particularly your first, can be a bit overwhelming. You’re going to want to pace yourself.

“But Anne!” conference brochure-clutching writers everywhere pipe up. “The schedule is jam-packed with offerings, many of which overlap temporally! I don’t want to miss a thing!”

Yes, it’s tempting to take every single class and listen to every speaker, but frankly, you’re going to be a better pitcher if you allow yourself to take occasional breaks. Cut yourself some slack; don’t book yourself for the entire time.

Why? Well, let me ask you this: would you rather be babbling incoherently during the last seminar of the weekend, or raising your hand to ask a coherent question?

Before you answer that, allow me to add: since most attendees’ brains are mush by the end of the conference, it’s generally easier to get close to an agent or editor who teaches a class on the final day. Fewer lines, less competition.

Do make a point of doing something other than lingering in the conference center for three or four days straight. Go walk around the block. Sit in the sun. Grab a cup of coffee with that fabulous literary fiction writer you just met. Hang out in the bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference; that tends to be where the already-agented and already-published hang out, anyway.

And don’t you dare feel guilty about doing any of these things. Skipping the occasional seminar does not constitute being lax about pursuing professional opportunities: it is smart strategy, to make sure you’re fresh for your pitches. If you can’t tear yourself away, take a few moments to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, to reset your internal pace from PANIC! to I’m-Doing-Fine.

I know that I sound like an over-eager Lamaze coach on this point, but I can’t overemphasize the importance of reminding yourself to keep breathing throughout the conference. A particularly good time for a nice lung-filling is immediately after you sit down in front of an agent or editor.

Trust me: your brain could use the oxygen right around then. It will help you calm down so you can make your most effective pitch.

And at the risk of sounding like the proverbial broken record, please, please, PLEASE don’t expect a conference miracle. Writing almost never sells on pitches alone, no matter how many times you have heard that apocryphal story about THE HORSE WHISPERER. You are not going to really know what an agent thinks about your work until she has read some of it.

Translation: it’s almost unheard-of for an agent to sign up a client during a conference. (And no, I have no idea why so many conference-organizers blithely hand out feedback forms asking if you found an agent at the event. Even the most successful conference pitchers generally don’t receive an offer for weeks, if not months.)

Remember, your goal here is not to be discovered on the spot, but to get the industry pro in front of you to ask to read your writing. Period.

Yes, I know: I’ve said this before. Repeatedly, throughout this very series. And I’m going to keep saying it as long as there are aspiring writers out there who walk into pitch meetings expecting to hear the agent cry, “My God, that’s the best premise since OLIVER TWIST. Here’s a representation contract — and look, here’s my favorite editor now. Let’s see if he’s interested. I want this book sold by midnight!”

Then, of course, the editor falls equally in love with it, offers an advance large enough to cover New Hampshire in $20 bills, and the book is out by Christmas. As an Oprah’s Book Club selection, naturally, even though neither the Oprah show nor her book club exist anymore.

Long-time readers, chant along with me now: this is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works. This is not how the publishing industry works…

Did I say that you could stop repeating it?

The key to being a happy conference-goer is not only to realize that the popular conception of how books move from manuscript to publication is dead wrong, but to believe it. Having to make a significant effort in order to get an agent to read your manuscript is normal.

Thus the appeal of conference pitching: done well, it will allow you to skip the querying stage and pass directly to the submission stage. So being asked to send pages is a terrific outcome for this situation, not a distant second place to an imaginary reality.

Admittedly, though, that is easy to forget in the throes of a pitch meeting. Almost as easy as forgetting that a request to submit is not a promise to represent or publish. Out comes the broken record again:

Whatever an agent or editor says to you in a conference situation is just a conversation at a conference, not the Sermon on the Mount or testimony in front of a Congressional committee. There is no such thing as an implied offer of representation or publication; there are only concrete offers and preliminary conversations. Everything is provisional until some paper has changed hands.

This is equally true, incidentally, whether your conference experience includes an agent who actually starts drooling visibly with greed while you were pitching or an editor in a terrible mood who raves for 15 minutes about how the public isn’t buying books anymore. Until you sign a mutually-binding contract, no promises — or condemnation, for that matter — should be inferred or believed absolutely.

Try to maintain perspective. If you can’t, stop and take a few deep breaths.

Admittedly, perspective is genuinely hard to achieve when a real, live agent says, “Sure, send me the first chapter,” especially if you’ve been shopping the book around for eons. But it is vital to keep in the back of your mind that eliciting this statement is not the end of your job as a marketer. Oh, look, here’s another golden oldie from the broken record collection:

Regardless of how much any given agent or editor says she loves your pitch, she’s not going to make an actual decision until she’s read at least part of it. And she’s not going to clear her schedule for the rest of the month to read it, either.

So even if you are over the moon about positive response from the agent of your dreams, please, I beg you, DO NOT STOP PITCHING IN THE HALLWAYS. Try to generate as many requests to see your work as you can.

Why, yes, you’re right: that is going to be a heck of a lot of work. What’s your point?

No matter who says yes to you first, you will be much, much happier two months from now if you have a longer requested submissions list. Ultimately, going to a conference to pitch only twice, when there are 20 agents in the building, is just not efficient.

Far too many aspiring writers will just give up after one successful pitch, assuming, often wrongly, that a friendly pitch meeting means a predisposition to like a submission or an implied promise to read it quickly. It doesn’t, and it isn’t. So it is VERY much in your interest to send out submissions to several agents at once, rather than one at a time.

I heard that gasp, but no, there is absolutely nothing unethical about this, unless (a) one of the agencies has a policy precluding multiple submissions (rare) or (b) you actively promised one agent an exclusive. (I would EMPHATICALLY discourage you from granting (b), by the way — and if you don’t know why, please see the EXCLUSIVES TO AGENTS category at right before you even CONSIDER pitching at a conference.)

Some of you look concerned, but trust me, this is what the agents will be expecting you to do. If an agent wants an exclusive peek, she will ask for one point-blank; again, there’s no such thing as a tacit request for a solo submission. By all means, tell each of the agents in the cover letter that others are looking at it, but don’t make the hugely pervasive mistake of granting an effective exclusive that the agent does not expect, simply because she was the one you liked best.

I see some of you blushing: you’ve made this mistake, haven’t you? And you ended up waiting six months to hear back — or did not hear back at all, right?

“Wow, Anne!” those of you who have lived through this highly unpleasant experience gasp. “What kind of a crystal ball are you wielding these days? That’s precisely what happened to me!”

No crystal ball needed on this one: it happens to pitchers all the time. They misunderstand the level of connection they made with agents at conferences, committing themselves in principle before the agents in question have even seen their work. “Well, we just clicked,” these writers say.

What they tend not to say is that let’s face it, it’s a heck of a lot less work — not to mention less wearing on the nerves — to send out one submission than, say, seven or eight. It’s also less work not to keep querying while that nice agent from the conference considers your submission.

And then one sad day, months after the conference, they receive the rejection, often as a form letter. “What happened?” one-at-a-timers cry. “I thought we clicked. And now I feel like it’s too late to send out those other requested materials.”

Actually, if less than a year has passed since the conference, it isn’t. But just think how much happier a writer who could say, “Well, I’m sad that the agent I liked best decided against representing my book, but at least those six other agents are still considering it,” would be in that moment. Or even one in a position to sigh with relief and murmur, “Wow, am I ever glad that I kept querying throughout these last six months. Now, I have other requests for materials.”

Besides, your time is valuable: sending out those post-conference submissions one at a time, waiting for a response from each before moving on to the next, could eat up years. Just mention in your cover letter to each that other agents are also reading it, and keep moving forward.

Trust me, hearing that it’s a multiple submission not going to annoy anyone. That old saw about agents’ getting insulted if you don’t submit one at a time is absolutely untrue. Let’s toss another broken record onto the turntable:

Unless an agent asks for an exclusive look at your work, it’s neither expected nor in your interest to act as if s/he has. In fact, hearing that others are interested may even make your book seem more attractive.

Yet another reason you should keep on pitching in those hallways: it tends to be a trifle easier to get to yes than in a formal pitch. Counter-intuitive, isn’t it? Yet in many ways, casual pitches are more persuasive.

Why? For one simple reason: time. In a hallway pitch, agents will often automatically tell a writer to submit the first chapter, simply in order to be able to keep on walking down the hall, finish loading salad onto their plates, or be able to move on to the next person in line after the agents’ forum.

Seriously, it’s true. If the agent handles your type of work, the premise is interesting, and you are polite, they will usually hand you their business cards and say, “Send me the first 50 pages.”

Okay, pop quiz to see who has been paying attention to this series so far: after the agent says this, do you:

(a) regard it as an invitation to talk about your work at greater length?

(b) regard it as an invitation to a lifetime of friendship?

(c) regard it as a promise to make you the next bestselling author?

(d) say, “Gee, you’re a much nicer human being than {insert name of other agent here}. He turned me down flat,” and go on to give details about how mean he was?

(e) launch into a ten-minute diatribe about the two years you’ve spent querying this particular project?

(f) thank her profusely and vanish in a puff of smoke, so you may pitch to another agent? And before you send out the requested pages IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD?

If you said anything but (Ff, I can only advise you go back and reread the Pitchingpalooza series — and as well as the entirety of the INDUSTRY ETIQUETTE category at right as well. You need to learn what’s considered polite and reasonable in the industry, pronto.

In a face-to-face pitch in a formal meeting, agents tend to be more selective than in a hallway pitch. Again, the reason is time: they’ve got more of it. In a ten-minute meeting, there is actual leisure to consider what you are saying, to weigh the book’s merits.

In short, enough time to save themselves some down the line by rejecting your book now.

Why might this seem desirable to them? Well, think about it: if you send it to them at their request, someone in their office is ethically required to spend time reading it, right? By rejecting it on the pitch alone, they’ve just saved Millicent the screener 5 or 10 minutes.

In a perverse way, a formal pitch can be significantly harder to give successfully than a hallway one. Sitting down in front of an agent or editor, looking her in the eye, and beginning to talk about your book can be quite a bit more intimidating than giving a hallway pitch.

Think of it this way: every time you buttonhole an agent and say those magic first hundred words is one less query letter you’re going to need to send out.

Still breathing at least once an hour? Good; I’ll move on.

As a veteran of many, many writers’ conferences all over the country, I can tell you from experience that they can be very, very tiring. Especially if it’s your first conference. Just sitting under fluorescent lights in an air-conditioned room for that many hours would tend to leech the life force out of you all by itself, but here, you will be surrounded by a whole lot of very stressed people while you are trying to learn as much as you possibly can.

As you may have noticed, most of my advice on how to cope with all of this ambient stress gracefully is pretty much what your mother said to you before you went to your first party: be polite; be nice to yourself and others; watch your caffeine and alcohol intake, and make sure to drink enough water throughout the day. Eat occasionally.

And you’re not wearing THAT, are you?

Actually, on the only occasion when my mother actually made that comment upon something I was wearing, she had made the frock in question. For my senior prom, she cranked out a backless little number in midnight-blue Chinese silk that she liked to call my “Carole Lombard dress,” for an occasion where practically every other girl was going to be wearing something demure and flouncy by Laura Ashley. It was, to put it mildly, not what anyone expected the valedictorian to wear.

She hastened to alter it. Even with the addition of quite a bit of additional fabric, most of the male teachers followed me around all night long. The last time I bumped into my old chorus teacher, he spontaneously recalled the dress. “A shame that you didn’t dress like that all the time,” he said wistfully.

Oh, what a great dress that was. Oh, how inappropriate it would have been for a writers’ conference — or really, for any occasion that did not involve going out for a big night on the town in 1939. But then, so would those prissy Laura Ashley frocks.

Which brings me back to my point (thank goodness).

I wrote on what you should and shouldn’t wear to a conference at some length in an earlier post, but if you find yourself in perplexity when you are standing in front of your closet, remember this solid rule that will help you wherever you go within the publishing industry: unless you will be attending a black-tie affair, you are almost always safe with what would be appropriate to wear to your first big public reading of your book.

And don’t those of you who have been hanging around the industry for a while wish someone had shared THAT little tidbit with you sooner?

To repeat a bit more motherly advice: do remember to eat something within an hour or two of your pitch meeting. I know that you may feel too nervous to be hungry but believe me, if you were going to pick an hour of your life for feeling light-headed, your first encounter with your future agent is not a wise choice. If you are giving a hallway pitch, or standing waiting to go into a meeting, make sure not to lock your knees, so you do not faint.

And practice, practice, practice before you go into your meetings. This is the single best thing you can do in advance to preserve yourself from being overwhelmed.

Fortunately, conferences are peculiarly rich in opportunities to practice talking about your book. As I pointed out yesterday, you will be surrounded by hundreds of other writers. Introduce yourself, and practice pitching to them. Better still, find people who share your interests and get to know them. Share a cookie; talk about your work with someone who will understand.

Because, really, is your life, is any writer’s life, already filled with too many people who get what we do? You will be an infinitely happier camper in the long run if you have friends who can understand your successes and sympathize with your setbacks as only another writer can.

I know this from experience, naturally. The first thing I said to many of my dearest friends in the world was, “So what do you write?”

To which the savvy conference-goer replies — chant it with me now, everyone — the magic first hundred words.

In fact, the first people I told about my first book deal — after my SO and my mother, of course — were people I had met in precisely this manner. Why call them before, say, my college roommate? Because ordinary people, the kind who don’t spend all of their spare time creating new realities out of whole cloth, honestly, truly, sincerely, often have difficulty understanding the pressures and timelines that rule writers’ lives.

I was lucky: I already knew a lot of writers, including my college roommate, who recently sold her first novel to Algonquin. (Well done, Julie!) But the very first words my erstwhile SO’s mother uttered after hearing that my memoir had sold were, “What do you mean, it’s not coming out for another couple of years? Can’t you write any faster than that?”

This kind of response is, unfortunately, common, and frankly, most people’s eyes glaze over about 42 seconds into an explanation of how a print queue works. I don’t think any writer ever gets used to seeing her non-writer friends’ faces fall upon being told that the book won’t be coming out for a year or two, at least, after the sale that’s just happened, or that signing with an agent does not automatically equal a publication contract, or that not every book is headed for the bestseller list.

Thought I got off track from the question of how to keep from getting stressed out, didn’t you? Actually, I didn’t: finding buddies to go through the conference process with you can help you feel grounded throughout both the weekend and your writing life.

Not only are these new buddies great potential first readers for your manuscripts, future writing group members, and people to invite to book readings, they’re also folks to pass notes to during talks. (Minor disobedience is a terrific way to blow off steam, I find.) You can hear about the high points of classes you don’t attend from them afterward.

And who wouldn’t rather walk into a room with 300 strangers and one keynote speaker with a newfound chum than alone?

Making friends within the hectic conference environment will help you retain a sense of being a valuable, interesting individual far better than keeping to yourself, and the long-term benefits are endless. To paraphrase Goethe, it is not the formal structures that make the world fell warm and friendly; friends make the earth feel like an inhabited garden.

So please, for your own sake: make some friends at the conference, so you will have someone to pick up the phone and call when the agent of your dreams falls in love with your first chapter and asks to see the entire book. And get to enjoy the vicarious thrill when your writing friends leap their hurdles, too.

You think it didn’t make my day when Julie’s book sold? It made my month. It showed that being serious, talented, and smart can indeed pay off in the long run.

This can be a very lonely business. Nothing brightens the long, slow slog like opening your e-mail when you’re really discouraged to find a message from a friend who’s just sold a book or landed an agent.

Well, okay, I’ll admit it: getting a call from your agent telling you that YOU have just sold a book is rather more of a day-brightener. As is the call saying, “I love your work, and I want to represent you.”

But the other is still awfully darned good. Start laying the groundwork for it now.

One more little thing that will help keep you from stressing out too much: while it’s always nice if you can be so comfortable with your pitch that you can give it from memory, it’s probably fair to assume that you’re going to be a LITTLE bit nervous during your meetings. So do yourself a favor — write it all down; give yourself permission to read it when the time comes, if you feel that will help you.

Really, it’s considered perfectly acceptable, and it will keep you from forgetting key points. Please humor me by writing on the top of the paper, in great big letters: BREATHE!

Do remember to pat yourself on the back occasionally, too, for being brave enough to put your ego on the line for your work. As with querying and submitting, it requires genuine guts to submit your ideas to the pros; I don’t think writers get enough credit for that.

In that spirit, I’m going to confess: I have one other conference-going ritual, something I do just before I walk into any convention center, anywhere, anytime, either to teach or to pitch. It’s not as courteous or as public-spirited as the other techniques I have described, but I find it is terrific for the mental health. I go away by myself somewhere and play at top volume Joe Jackson’s song Hit Single and Jill Sobule’s (I Don’t Want to Get) Bitter.

The former, a charming story about dumbing down a song so it will stand a better chance of making it big on the pop charts, includes the perfect lyric to hum while walking into a pitch meeting:

And when I think of all the years of finding out What I already knew Now I spread myself around And you can have 3 minutes, too.

If that doesn’t summarize the difference between pitching your work verbally and being judged on the quality of the writing itself, I should like to know what does. (Sorry, Joe: I would have preferred to link above to your site, but your site mysteriously doesn’t include lyrics.)

The latter, a song about complaining, concludes with a pretty good mantra for any conference-goer:

So I’ll smile with the rest, wishing everyone the best. And know the one who made it made it because she was actually pretty good. ‘Cause I don’t want to get bitter. I don’t want to turn cruel. I don’t want to get old before I have to. I don’t want to get jaded. Petrified and weighted. I don’t want to get bitter like you.

I hum that one a lot during conferences, I’ll admit — and not because you can’t throw a piece of bread at a major writers’ conference without hitting someone just delighted to moan about how hard it is to get published these days. Cynicism often masquerades as knowledge. I tend to start humming when a bestselling author who landed his agent 25 years ago, when the task was significantly easier, or a more recent success whose agent is her cousin’s next-door neighbor’s husband tells a roomful of people who have been querying for the past five years that good writing will inevitably find a home.

Perhaps, but certainly not easily. The Agency Fairy just receives too many requests for help these days. Anyone who tells you that the only possible barrier to landing an agent is the quality of your writing simply isn’t familiar with the current reality of the representation market.

What you’re trying to do is not easy or fun, but you can do it. You are your book’s best advocate; act like it. And remember, all you’re trying to do is to get these nice people to take a look at your writing.

No more, no less. It’s a perfectly reasonable request for an aspiring writer to make to an agent, and you’re going to be terrific at making it. How do I know? Because you’ve been sensible and brave enough to face your fears and prepare like a professional.

Kudos to you for taking your writing that seriously. Keep breathing, everyone, and keep up the good work!

My apologies for the unexpected mid-series hiatus; I honestly had not anticipated that Pitchingpalooza would carry us into September. (Especially as I have some genuinely juicy treats in store for you over Labor Day weekend.) Blame the muses’ notoriously perverse sense of humor for arranging to have two — count ‘em, two — of my editing clients’ acquiring editors announcing that they were moving on to pastures new last week. Everyone concerned wishes them happy trails, of course, but with a certain amount of trepidation: with any changing of the editorial guard inevitably comes changed expectations for the handed-over manuscript.

Okay, I’m not entirely clear on what that massive collective gasp of horror out there in the ether meant. Were some of you unaware that in recent years, it has become not at all uncommon for the acquiring editor not to remain with the publishing house long enough to see a book she just loved as a submission all the way through the publishing process? Or was the shock — and I suspect it was — that editors will often ask for major changes in manuscripts after they have acquired them, for both fiction and nonfiction?

Oh, I’m sorry; I should have warmed all of you memoirists out there before I sprung that last bit, especially those of you who have been slaving over the Annotated Table of Contents in your book proposals in anticipation of a post-Labor Day submission blitz. I know that you have been working hard, trying to cobble together a plausible and entertaining story arc in a series of chapter summaries — so it may well be dispiriting to hear that it’s far from rare for an acquiring editor, or even an agent offering representation to a nonfiction author, to tell the point-blank that some of those chapters will need to go. Or that others should be added.

Starting to make more sense now that nonfiction is typically sold on a book proposal, not a completed manuscript? While most of the book is theoretical, it’s easier to conceive of changing it.

Yes, even if the writer believes that it is already finished. No matter how complete a memoir or nonfiction book may be in the author’s mind, from a publishing perspective, everything is up for negotiation until it is actually in print and sitting on a bookstore shelf. What is and isn’t finished is the publisher’s call, not the author’s. That assumption pervades the submission stage, and even the pitching/querying stage of a proposal’s progress. From the acquiring editor’s point of view, the proposal is essentially a job application: the writer is making the case that she is the best person currently wandering this terrestrial sphere for the publishing house to hire to write that particular book.

See why I’ve spent this series urging all of you nonfiction writers to spend this series thinking about your platform, and figuring out ways to work it into your pitch?

I sensed all of you novelists relaxing over the course of the last couple of paragraphs, but perhaps you shouldn’t have: agents and editors ask fiction writers to change their manuscripts all the time, too, even absent an editorial changing of the guard. Little things, usually, like whether the ending of the book is dramatically satisfying or whether a complex literary voice constitutes overwriting or is just right.

And while we’re massaging the text, need the protagonist’s sister be gay? Or a deep-sea fisherperson with marked propensities toward disestablishmentarianism?

Oh, you may laugh, but with the high turnover at publishing houses these days, a savvy writer needs to be prepared to be flexible. Just don’t modify your only electronic copy of your original manuscript; it’s not beyond belief that the editor who takes over tomorrow from the person who took over yesterday will like the same things about your book that the acquiring editor did.

Are your heads spinning, campers? Good: you’re in a perfect mindset to think about conference pitching.

After the last couple of Pitchingpalooza posts we talked about how to pull everything we’ve learned throughout this series into a formal 2-minute pitch. Couldn’t you feel the excitement crackling in the air? The moment nearly brought a tear to the eye: the public rejoiced, the heavens opened, lions and lambs lay down together, and agents all over New York spontaneously flung their arms around the nearest aspiring writer, gurgling with joy.

What, you missed all that? Even the good folks cleaning up the ticker tape parade?

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating a trifle. And maybe those of you who aren’t planning to attend a conference and pitch anytime soon didn’t find it all that goosebump-inducing. “Let’s get on with it, Anne,” some nonambulant writers scoffed. “Let’s get back to the type of stuff that writers do at home in the solitude of their lonely studios: writing, rewriting, querying, rewriting some more…”

Patience, scoffers: as I may have mentioned once or twice in the course of this admittedly rather extensive series, learning to pitch is going to make you a better querier. And perhaps even a better writer, at least as far as marketing is concerned.

Did I just hear the scoffers snort derisively again? Allow me to ask a clarifying question, smarty-pantses (astute slacksers?): hands up, every querying veteran out there who now wishes devoutly that s/he had known more about how the publishing industry thinks about books before querying for the first time.

That’s quite a response. Keep ‘em up if you sent out more than five queries before you figured out what your book’s selling points were.

Or — sacre bleu! – your book’s category.

That last one is so common that I decided to spare you the artistic representation, so there would still be room on the page for the rest of today’s post. The very idea of querying without knowing makes me cringe: how can you even guess which agents to query before you’ve come up with that?

Which is precisely why it’s a good idea for even writers who would never dream of pitching their books in person to learn how to do it. Not only are many of the same skills required to construct a winning pitch and a successful query letter, but many of the actual building blocks are the same.

Oh, you hadn’t noticed that?

Rest assured, it’s all been part of my evil plan. After Labor Day, we are going to delve once again into the wonderful world of querying. After a few well-deserved treats and perhaps a couple of short forays into craft, of course.

Why wait until after Labor Day, you ask? Long-time readers, chant it with me now: because a hefty hunk of the NYC-based publishing industry goes on vacation from the second week of August through Labor Day. And when they get back, guess what’s piled up high on their already-cluttered desks?

Uh-huh. Might as well hold off until they’ve had a chance to dig through those thousands of piled-up queries.

Trust me, you certainly have time to ponder the mysteries of pitching, glean a few insights, and think about your book’s selling points before our old pal, Millicent the agency screener, will wade her way through the backlog. Heck, you would also have time for a mastoid operation and a trip to the Bahamas; for a good week or two into September, Millie’s going to need be rejecting at a speeded-up clip, just to get through the backlog. Not to mention the thousands of queries that will dumped on her desk just after Labor Day, because so many aspiring writers had heard that they shouldn’t query in August.

I can already feel some of you gearing up to query up a storm that weekend, but honestly, you might want to hold off for a week or two. And whatever you do, do not send an e-mailed query over a long weekend; the probability of getting rejected skyrockets.

Why, you shriek in horror? Millie’s inbox overfloweth on pretty much any Monday, because writers tend to have more time on the weekends. Labor Day weekend is especially popular, because so many of you have been tapping your toes impatiently, waiting for agencies to become populated again. By restraining yourself until, say, Wednesday, your e-mailed query

“But Anne,” I hear some reformed scoffers point out, “why shouldn’t I add my query letter to that pile? Won’t they answer them in the order received?”

Well, more or less. However, Millie’s been known to be a mite grumpy until she has cleared enough desk space to set down her latte. Any guesses what the quickest way to clear a desk of queries is?

Wait until the second week of September. At least.

In the meantime — which is to say: for the next few days — I want to round off Pitchingpalooza with some in-depth discussion of how to navigate a writer’s conference. Yes, yes, I know, we’ve been talking about conferences for the last month, but be fair:: I visit the topic only once per year. It’s been a long visit this time, admittedly, of the type that may well make some of you long for the houseguests to go home, already, but still, I don’t talk about it that often.

Perhaps that’s a mistake, since writers’ conference attendance has been skyrocketing of late. Blame the hesitant economy; writing a book is a lot of people’s fallback position. Interesting, given how few novelists actually make a living at it, but hey, a dream’s a dream.

Literary conferences can be pretty hard to navigate your first time around — and that’s unfortunate, because the darned things tend not to be inexpensive. Like pitching and querying, there are some secret handshakes that enable some aspiring writers to hobnob more effectively than others, as well as norms of behavior that may seem downright perplexing to the first-time attendee.

Up to and including the fact that there’s more to getting the most out of a conference than just showing up, or even showing up and pitching. So I’m going to be talking about the nuts and bolts of conference attendance, with an eye to helping you not only pitch more successfully, but also take advantage of the often amazing array of resources available to aspiring writers at a good conference.

Not to mention feeling more comfortable in your skin while you’re there.

Last week, I brought up a couple of the more common conceptual stumbling-blocks writers tend to encounter while prepping their elevator speeches and formal pitches. The first and most virulent, of course, is coming to terms with the necessity of marketing oneâ€™s writing at all — in other words, to begin to think of it not just as one’s baby, but as a product you’re trying to sell.

Half of you just tensed up, didn’t you?

I’m not all that surprised. From an artistic perspective, the only criterion for whether an agent or editor picks up a manuscript should be the quality of the writing, followed distantly by the inherent interest of the story. For many writers, the burning question of whether a market for the book already demonstrably exists doesn’t even crop up during the composition process; they write because they are writers — and writers write.

Is anyone but me sick of that well-worn tautology, by the way? Is it actually any more profound than saying that spelunkers explore caves, or that orchard-tenders have been known to pick the occasional apple?

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but books do not get published simply because someone has taken the trouble to write them — or even because they are well-written. An aspiring writer must make the case that her book is not only a great yarn, but one that will fit into the current book market neatly. And, as many a pitcher and querier knows to her sorrow, she will need to make that case before anyone in the industry be willing to take a gander at the actual writing.

I know, I know: it seems backwards. But as I believe I have mentioned approximately 1704 times before, I did not set up the prevailing conditions for writers; I merely try to cast them in comprehensible terms for all of you.

If I ran the universe — which, annoyingly, I still donâ€™t, as nearly as I can tell — writers would be able to skip the pitch-and-query stage entirely, simply submitting the manuscripts directly with no marketing materials, to allow the writing to speak for itself. Every submitter would receive thoughtful, helpful, generous-minded feedback, too, and enchanted cows would wander the streets freely, giving chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk to anyone who wanted it — or soy milk to the lactose-intolerant. I might even spring for wandering pixies wielding juicers, to bring orange, mango, and kale juice to a neighborhood near you.

But I do not, alas, run the universe, so SeÃ±or Saramago and certain aspects of the publishing industry are likely to remain mysteries eternal. (What harm would it have done him to use a period at the end of a sentence occasionally? Or a question mark at the end of a question?)

Long-time readers, chant it with me now: no matter how talented you are, if you hope to get published, the marketing step is a necessity. Even if you were Stephen King, William Shakespeare, and Madame de StaÃ«l rolled into one, in the current writersâ€™ market, you would still need to approach many, many agents and/or editors to find the right match for your work — and your work would stand a much, much better chance if you talk about it in the language of the industry.

That’s true, incidentally, even if you approach an agent whose submission guidelines ask writers to send pages along with the initial query, instead of by special request afterward (as used to be universal). If the marketing approach is not professionally crafted, chances are slim that those pages will even get read.

Oh, there you go, gasping again, but honestly, this is a simple matter of logistics. Remember, a good agency typically receives somewhere between 800 and 1500 queries per week. If Millicent isn’t wowed by the letter, she simply doesn’t have time to cast her eyes over those 5 or 10 or 50 pages the agency’s website said that you could send.

That’s not being mean. That’s trying to get through all of those queries without working too much overtime.

Unfortunately, the imperative to save time usually also dictates form-letter rejections that the querier entirely in the dark about whether the rejection trigger was in the query or the pages. (Speaking of realistic expectations, please tell me that you didn’t waste even thirty seconds of YOUR precious time trying to read actual content into it didn’t grab me, I just didn’t fall in love with it, it doesn’t meet our needs that this time, or any of the other standard rejection generalities. By definition, one-size-fits-all reasons cannot possibly tell you how to improve your submission.)

All of which is to say: please, I implore you, do not make the very common mistake of believing that not being picked up by the first agent whom you pitch or query means that your work is not marketable. Or of adhering to the even more common but less often spoken belief that if a book were really well written, it would somehow be magically exempted from the marketing process.

It doesn’t, and it isn’t. Unrealistic expectations about the pitching — and querying — process can and do not only routinely make aspiring writers unhappy at conferences the world over, but frequently also prevent good writers from pitching well.

Yes, you read that correctly. Operating on misinformation can genuine hurt a writer, as can a fearful or resentful attitude. Part of learning to pitch — or query — successfully entails accepting the fact that from the industryâ€™s point of view, you are presenting a PRODUCT to be SOLD.

Not, as the vast majority of writers believe, and with good reason, a piece of one’s soul ripped off without anesthesia.

So it is a teeny bit counter-productive to respond — as an astonishingly high percentage of first-time pitchers do — to the expectation that they should be able to talk about their books in market-oriented terms as evidence that they are dealing with Philistines who hate literature.

To clear up any possible confusion for the high-browed: you should, and they donâ€™t.

Why do so many pitchers respond to the pros as though they were evil demons sent to earth for the sole purpose of tormenting the talented and rewarding the illiterate? Selling books is how agents and editors make their livings, after all: they have to be concerned about whether thereâ€™s a market for a book they are considering.

They’re not being shallow; they’re being practical.

Okay, most of them are not just being shallow. My point, should you care to know it: a pitching appointment is not the proper venue for trying to change the status quo. Querying or pitching is hard enough to do well without simultaneously decrying the current realities of book publishing.

And yes, in response to that question your brain just shouted, aspiring writers do bring that up in their pitches and queries. All the time. Heck, it’s not all that unusual for a pitcher to mention that the book has been rejected before, and how often.

Don’t emulate their example. Trust me on this one: it’s not going to make your book seem more market-ready to bring up that you’ve already queried it 700 times.

That isn’t just poor strategy — it’s symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes an author successful. Selling is a word that many writers seem to find distasteful when applied to trying to land an agent, as if there were no real distinction between selling one’s work (most of the time, the necessary first step to the world’s reading it) and selling out (which entails a compromise of principle.)

C’mon — you know what I’m talking about; if not, just bring up the issue over a sandwich at your next writers’ conference. This is a real, vitriol-stained topic in writers’ circles.

When aspiring writers speak of marketing amongst themselves, it tends to be with a slight curl of the lip, an incipient sneer, as if the mere fact of signing with an agent or getting a book published would be the final nail in the coffin of artistic integrity. While practically everyone who writes admires at least one or two published authors — all of whom, presumably, have to deal with this issue at one time or another — the prospect of compromising oneâ€™s artistic vision haunts many a writerâ€™s nightmares.

That’s a valid fear, I suppose, but allow me to suggest another, less black-and-white possibility: fitting the square peg of one’s book into the round holes of marketing can be an uncomfortable process, but that doesn’t mean it is inherently deadly to artistic integrity. It also doesnâ€™t mean that any writer, no matter how talented, can legitimately expect to be commercially successful without going through that process.

That is not to say there are not plenty of good reasons for writers to resent how the business side of the industry works — there are, and itâ€™s healthy to gripe about them. Resent it all you want privately, or in the company of other writers.

But do not, I beg you, allow that resentment to color the pitch you ultimately give. Or the query letter.

I know, I know: if you’ve been hanging out at conferences for a while, deep-dyed cynicism about the book market can start to sound a whole lot like the lingua franca. One can get a lot of social mileage out of being the battle-scarred submission veteran who tells the new recruits war stories — or the pitcher in the group meeting with an editor who prefaces his comments with, “Well, this probably isn’t the right market for this book concept, but…”

To those who actually work in the industry, complaining about the current market’s artistic paucity will not make you come across as serious about your work — as it tends to do amongst other writers, admittedly. The pros just hear it too often. As a result, such complaints are likely to insult the very people who could help you get beyond the pitching and querying stage.

Yes, you may well gulp. To an agentâ€™s ears, writers who complain about how much harder it is to get one’s work read than even ten years ago — it’s not your imagination — tend to sound, well, naÃ¯ve. Of course it’s hard to break into the business; simple math dictates that.

“What does your perhaps well-founded critique of how the industry works have to do with whether I want to read your manuscript?” the pros murmur as writers lecture them on how it really should be easier. “I’m sitting right here — wouldn’t this time be better spent telling me what your book is about?”

Besides, neither a pitch meeting nor a query letter is primarily about writing, really. They’re both about convincing agents and editors that here is a story or topic that can sell to a particular target audience.

If your pitch convinces them that your work falls into that category, then they will ask to see pages. Out comes the broken record again:

Contrary to what the vast majority of aspiring writers believe, the goal of the pitch (and the query letter) is not to make the business side of the industry fall in love with your writing, per se — itâ€™s to get the agent or editor to whom it is addressed to ask to see manuscript pages or a proposal.

Then, and only then, is it logically possible for them to fall in love with your prose stylings or vigorous argument. I’ve said it before, and I’ll doubtless say it again: no one in the world can judge your writing without reading it.

This may seem obvious outside the context of a pitching or querying experience, but itâ€™s worth a reminder during conference season. Too many writers walk out of pitching meetings or recycle rejections from queries believing, wrongly, that theyâ€™ve just been told that they cannot write. Itâ€™s just not true.

But by the same token, a successful verbal pitch or enthusiastically-received query letter is not necessarily a ringing endorsement of writing talent, either. Both are merely the marketing materials intended to prompt a request to see the writing itself.

Which means, of course, that if you flub your pitch, you should not construe that as a reflection of your writing talent, either; logically, it cannot be, unless the agent or editor takes exception to how you construct your verbal sentences.

I know, I know, it doesnâ€™t feel that way at the time, and frankly, the language that agents and editors tend to use at moments like these (â€œNo one is buying X anymore,â€ or “I could have sold that story ten years ago, but not now”) often does make it sound like a review of your writing. But it isnâ€™t; it canâ€™t be.

All it can be, really, is a statement of belief about current and future conditions on the book market, not the final word about how your book will fare there. Just as with querying, if an agent or editor does not respond to your pitch, just move on to the next prospect on your list.

Does any of that that make you feel better about the prospect of walking into a pitch meeting? Did it at least permit you to get good and annoyed at the necessity of pitching and querying, to allow all of that frustration to escape your system?

Good. Now youâ€™re ready to prep your pitch.

Did I just sense some eye-rolling out there? “But Anne,” I hear some chronically sleep-deprived preppers cry, “can’t you read a calendar? I’ve been working on my pitch for weeks now. I keep tinkering with it; I know I have the perfect pitch in me, but I can’t seem to bring it out.”

I know precisely what you mean. After staring for so long at a single page of text (which is, after all, what a formal pitch ends up being, at most), it can feel like it’s taken over one’s life. As with any revision process, either on oneâ€™s own work or othersâ€™, one can become a touch myopic, both literally and figuratively.

How myopic, you ask? Let me share an anecdote of the illustrative variety.

A couple of years ago, I went on a week-long writing retreat in another state in order to make a small handful of revisions to a novel of mine. Small stuff, really, but my agent was new to the project (having inherited it when my original agent went on maternity leave) and wanted me to give the work a slightly different spin before he started submitting it. Basically, he wanted it to sound a bit more like his type of book, the kind editors had grown to expect from his submissions. Perfectly legitimate, of course (if it doesn’t sound like that to you, please see both the GETTING GOOD AT ACCEPTING FEEDBACK and HOW TO BE AN AGENT’S DREAM CLIENT categories on the list at right before you even consider getting involved with an agent), and I’m glad to report that the revisions went smoothly.

At the end of my week of intensive revision, a friend and her 6-year-old daughter were kind enough to give me, my computer, and my many empty bottles of mineral water (revision is thirsty work, after all, and the retreat did not offer glass recycling) a ride back from my far-flung retreat site. Early in the drive, my friend missed a turn, and made a not entirely flattering reference to her Maker.

Nothing truly soul-blistering, mind you, just a little light taking of the Lordâ€™s name in vain. Fresh from vacation Bible school, her daughter pointed out, correctly, that her mother had just broken a commandment and should be ashamed of herself. (Apparently, her school hadnâ€™t yet gotten to the one about honoring thy father and thy mother.)

â€œNot if God wasnâ€™t capitalized,â€ I said without thinking. â€œIf itâ€™s a lower-case g, she could have been referring to any god. Apollo, for example, or Zeus. For all we know, they may kind of like being berated in moments of crisis. It could make them feel important.â€

Now, that was a pretty literal response, and one that generated a certain amount of chagrin when the little girl repeated it in her next Sunday school class. Not that I wasnâ€™t technically correct, of course, but I should have let the situation determine what is an appropriate response. Sometimes, you just have to go with the flow.

That’s true in pitching, too. Hyper-literalism can cause quite a bit of unnecessary stress during conference prep. In part, thatâ€™s the nature of the beast: since aspiring writers are not told nearly enough about what to expect from a pitching appointment (or a potential response to a query), they tend to grasp desperately at what few guidelines they are given, following them to the letter.

To a certain extent, that makes perfect sense: when going into an unfamiliar, stressful situation, itâ€™s natural to want to cling to rules. The trouble, as I have pointed out throughout this series, is that not everything writers are told about pitching, querying, or even — dare I say it? — what does and doesnâ€™t sell in writing is applicable to their individual situations, or even up-to-date. Adhering too closely to the wrong rules can be a serious liability.

Anyone who has ever attended a writersâ€™ conference has seen the result: the causalities of hyper-literalism abound.

Since not all of you are nodding sagely, allow let me take you on a guided tour: thereâ€™s the writer who lost precious hours of sleep last night because her prepared pitch is four sentences long, instead of three; thereâ€™s the one who despairs because heâ€™s been told that he should not read his pitch, but memorize it, but stress has turned his brain into Swiss cheese. The guy over here is working so many dashes, commas, and semicolons into his three-sentence pitch that it goes on for six minutes — but has only three periods. In another corner mopes the romance writer who has just heard an agent say that sheâ€™s not looking for Highland romances anymore; naturally, the writer hears this as no one is looking to acquire your kind of book any more.

You get the picture. As writers listen to litanies of what they are doing wrong, and swap secrets they have learned elsewhere, the atmosphere becomes palpably heavy with depression.

By the end of the conference, the truisms all of these individuals have shared will have bounced around, mutating like the messages in the childrenâ€™s game of Telephone. That, combined with days on end of every word each attending agent, editor, and/or teacher utters being treated with the reverence of Gospel, there is generally a whole lot of rule-mongering going on. And if a writer has a sound analytical mind, he is apt to notice that a heck of a lot of those rules are mutually contradictory.

Take a nice, deep breath. The industry is not trying to trick you. What it is trying to do is get you to adhere to under-advertised publishing norms. While some of those norms are indeed inflexible — the rigors of standard manuscript format, for instance — most of the time, you will be fine if you adhere to the spirit of the norm, rather than its letter.

So those of you who are freaking out about a few extra words in your elevator speech: donâ€™t. It needs to be short, but it is far better to take an extra ten seconds to tell your story well than to cut it so short that you tell it badly. No agent or editor in the world is going to be standing over you while you pitch, abacus in hand, ready to shout at you to stop once you reach 101 words in a hallway pitch, any more than she will be counting its periods.

Admittedly, they may begin to get restive if you go on too long — but in conversation, length is not measured in number of words or frequency of punctuation. It is measured in the passage of time.

Let me repeat that, because I think some pitchers’ concerns on the subject are based in a misunderstanding born of the ubiquity of the three-sentence pitch: the purpose of keeping the elevator speech to 3-4 sentences is not because there is some special virtue in that number of sentences, but to make sure that the elevator speech is short enough that you could conceivably blurt it out in 30-45 seconds.

Thus the term. The elevator speech should be sufficiently brief to leave your lips comprehensibly between the time the elevator shuts on you and the agent of your dreams on the ground floor and when it opens again on the second floor.

Remember, though, that no matter what you may have heard, an elevator speech is not a formal pitch but a curtailed version of it. The elevator speech, hallway pitch, and pitch proper are primarily differentiated by the length of time required to say them.

So if you feel the urge to be nit-picky, put that energy to good use: it actually makes far more sense to time your pitch than it does to count the words. Try to keep your elevator speech under 45 seconds, your hallway pitch to roughly 60 â€“ 75 seconds max, and your pitch proper to 2 minutes or so.

But do not, I beg you, rend your hair in the midnight hours between now and your next pitching opportunity trying to figure out how to cut your pitch from 2 minutes, 15 seconds down to 2, or plump it up from a minute seventeen to 2, just because I advise that as a target length.

I’m not going to be standing there with a stopwatch, any more than an agent is. And until I rule the universe, I can pretty much guarantee that no agent or editor, even my own, is ever going to say, “Well, that WOULD have been a great pitch, but unfortunately, it was 17.4 seconds longer than Anne Mini says it should be, so I’m going to have to pass.”

Even if I did rule the universe (will someone get on that, please?), no one would ever say that to you. It’s in your best interest to adhere to the spirit of my advice on the pitch — or anyone else’s — not necessarily the letter.

How might one go about doing that? Well, remember that elevator speech I wrote a couple of weeks ago for PRIDE AND PREJUDICE?

19th-century 19-year-old Elizabeth Bennet has a whole host of problems: a socially inattentive father, an endlessly chattering mother, a sister who spouts aphorisms as she pounds deafeningly on the piano, two other sisters who swoon whenever an Army officer walks into the room, and her own quick tongue, any one of which might deprive Elizabeth or her lovely older sister Jane of the rich husband necessary to save them from being thrown out of their house when their father dies. When wealthy humanity-lover Mr. Bingley and disdainful Mr. Darcy rent a nearby manor house, Elizabethâ€™s mother goes crazy with matchmaking fever, jeopardizing Janeâ€™s romance with Bingley and insisting that Elizabeth marry the first man who proposes to her, her unctuous cousin Mr. Collins, a clergyman who has known her for less than a week. After the familyâ€™s reputation is ruined by her youngest sisterâ€™s seduction by a dashing army officer, can Elizabeth make her way in the adult world, holding true to her principles and marrying the man she passionately loves, or will her familyâ€™s prejudices doom her and Jane to an impecunious and regretful spinsterhood?

Because I love you people, I went back and timed how long it would take me to say: sixty- two seconds, counting gestures and vocal inflections that I would consider necessary for an effective performance. Thatâ€™s perfectly fine, for either a hallway speech or pitch proper. Actually, for a pitch proper, I would go ahead and add another sentence or two of glowing detail.

To be fair, though, it is a bit long for an elevator speech, if I intended to include any of the magic first hundred words as well. If I had just spent a weekend prowling the halls, buttonholing agents for informal hallway pitches, I would have tried to shear off ten seconds or so, so I could add at the beginning that the book is women’s fiction and the title.

Oh, and to have the time to indicate that my parents loved me enough to give me a name, and manners enough to share it with people when I first meet them. But seriously, I would not lose any sleep over those extra ten seconds, if I were pinched for time. Nor should you.

Brevity is not, however, the only virtue a pitch should have, any more than every single-page letter in the world is automatically a stellar query. If youâ€™re marketing a novel, you need to demonstrate two things: that this is a good story, and that you are a good storyteller. Similarly, if you are pitching a NF book, you need to show in your pitch that this is a compelling topic, and that you are the world’s best-equipped person to write about it.

As any good storyteller can tell you, compelling storytelling lies largely in the scintillating details. I have been listening to writersâ€™ pitches for significantly longer than I have been giving them myself — in addition to my adult professional experience, I also spent part of my wayward youth trailing a rather well-known author around to SF conventions; aspiring writers were perpetually leaping out from behind comic books and gaming tables to tell him about their book — so I can tell you with authority: far more pitches fail due to being full of generalities than because they have an extra fifteen secondsâ€™ worth of fascinating details.

Embrace the spirit of brevity, not the letter. If you must add an extra second or two in order to bring in a particularly striking visual image, or to mention a plot point that in your opinion makes your book totally unlike anything else out there, go ahead and do it.

Revel in this being the one and only time that any professional editor will ever tell you this: try not to be too anal-retentive about adhering to pre-set guidelines. It will only make you tense.

As the song says, keep those spirits high, pulses low. Oh, and keep up the good work!

Is it me, or did someone assume that the folks driving the delivery trucks needed just a tad more prompting about where to drop those packages than a reasonable person might in fact need? Wouldn’t everyone’s life have been a whole lot simpler if the manager of this facility just sprung to have a sign made that would blare LOOK — IF YOU HAVE A DELIVERY, COME DOWN THIS ROAD. EVERYONE ELSE SHOVE OFF or some similarly blunt and unambiguous statement?

You know me, folks — I’m a huge fan of clarity. (Oh, that didn’t occur to you during last January’s 23-part series on how to format a book manuscript? Next winter, it will be 24 parts — a reader asked a really good question in the archives.) I’m also, when it comes to hallway pitching, a big fan of writers’ being absolutely clear on where and when it is and is not appropriate to accost an agent in a hallway (or bar) at a writers’ conference, politely ask if s/he could spare thirty seconds, and give the shortened version of your pitch known as the elevator speech.

Where is particularly important. And not only because the single most frequently-expressed concern writers have about hallway pitching is appearing rude.

It’s not surprising that first-time pitchers tend to be worried about this — a hefty percentage of the information on conference pitching floating around out there consist of some form of there are agents and editors who just hate it when a writer comes up to them at a conference and pitches a book without an appointment. Therefore, all agents and editors must hate it. Even if a writer happens to find herself seated next to the agent of her dreams at a rubber chicken luncheon, under no circumstances should she even consider preparing a coherent answer to the friendly question, “So what do you write?”

I get that fear; honestly, I do. If you happen to have heard an agent say point-blank in an interview that he hates being buttonholed in hallways, by all means, do not buttonhole him in hallways. But to assume that all agents and editors share identical opinions on this subject is to fall into the same trap that aspiring writers so often do about querying and submission: it doesn’t take very many repetitions for a single agent’s personal preference, expressed on a conference dais or on a blog, to get magnified by that great game of Telephone we call the Internet into a dictum ostensibly crafted to be applicable to every pitching opportunity, anytime, anywhere: thou shalt not pitch at all outside a scheduled pitch meeting — and if the conference organizers schedule you for an appointment with someone who does not represent your kind of book, well, too bad. Better luck at next year’s expensive conference.

I’ve spoken at some length in this series about the vast difference between a polite, professional pitch — one that includes delightful and emollient phrases like, “Excuse me, may I disturb you for a moment?” “You mentioned at the agents’ forum that you represent books like mine, and I could not obtain an appointment with you,” and/or “Thank you very much for your time. I shall be going now.” — and the kind of rude, blustery pitch that most hallway pitch-haters have in mind when they express negative opinions about it. While it might be safe to draw a general conclusion about the inadvisability of being rude to any stranger one wants to approach to ask any favor, it seems like overkill (rather like the signage above) to swear off the possibility of making a connection with an agent who might love your work because some other agent got offended once. It just isn’t logical.

But it makes a whole lot more sense if one bears in mind the possibility that the original, “Ooh, I hate it when aspiring writers stop me in the hallway to pitch,” statement was part of a sentence that continued, “when I am trying to race to the bathroom,” does it not? And who could blame the agent — or indeed, any agent — for feeling that way?

I suspect, though, that the primary appeal of the surprisingly pervasive conference circuit truism against hallway pitching is not so much its underlying logic as its implicit permission — nay, admonition — for a would-be pitcher at a conference not muster the courage to walk up to that agent who is three feet away and ask politely to pitch. For the nervous, the ostensible ban on hallway pitching is a virtual Get Out of Pitching Free card, relieving them of the obligation to try to find an agent via a face-to-face approach.

Unfortunately, many literary contest winners and finalists regard their status (and the fact that at many conferences that give out such awards, winners and placers are singled out for public praise, always delightful) as a Get Out of Pitching Free card, too. They expect — wrongly, usually, but not without reason — that having done so well in the contest sponsored by the same organization that is throwing the conference, the agents and editors in attendance would seek them out, not the other way around. Or at least that the conference’s organizers would go out of their way to throw contest winners and agents who might snap ‘em up together in the same room.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but this happens surprisingly seldom. Most of the time, contest winners and finalists are given no more pitching opportunities than other conference attendees, and it’s far from the norm that contest winners are automatically mobbed by agents. The latter are usually more receptive to winners and finalists, but by and large, it’s the writer’s responsibility to walk up and make that connection.

Which generally entails — wait for it — giving a hallway pitch.

I say this, incidentally, not just as the writers’ booster who often ends up holding contest-winners’ hands at the end of the conference as they say over and over again, “I can’t believe that no agent asked me to submit pages!” I also say this as a writer who has actually been in this position. When I won my first big award for my memoir, I was lucky: the president of the award-granting organization actually did corral yours truly and the winner of the main fiction award, lecture us on the importance of not wasting any or all of the pitching opportunities that the rest of the conference would afford, and herded us into a party with a couple of dozen agents.

We both pitched more or less non-stop for the rest of the conference. Fortunately, I had come prepared for it: several friends of mine had won similar contests, so I had been on the receiving end of many a pep talk. I walked out of it with more than a dozen requests for pages. As a direct result, I had the luxury of choosing between offers from several agents.

How many requests do you think I would have generated had I not pitched like a fiend? Ask the winners from subsequent years, the ones who did not heed the president’s pep talk. I’ve ended up holding their hands at the end of conferences, too.

I’m bringing this up not to gloat about my success, but because not all contest winners and finalists were as lucky as I was to know that it was my job, not the attending agents’, to take advantage of that first-place ribbon fluttering from my name tag. I’m hoping my experience will believe me when I tell you a basic truth of conference pitching: while the pitch you are bold enough to make might get rejected, the pitch you never work up nerve to give will certainly be rejected — by you.

Please, contest winners and finalists, do not remain passive here: although contest wins are undoubtedly excellent Eye-Catching Query Letter Candy (ECQLC), at no place or time will your having done so well in that contest be as easy to parlay into a conversation with an agent as when that agent has just seen you handed a ribbon. How might a savvy contest winner initiate such a conversation? How about like this: “Excuse me, but could you spare me a moment? I’ve just won Award X for my book, and you mentioned at the agents’ forum that you represent work in that book category. Would you be interested in hearing a quick pitch?”

I can already hear those of you whose entries did not do quite so well breathing a sigh of relief. “Okay, Anne,” the time-conscious cry, “that lets me out. Unless I just happen to fall into conversation with an agent — if, say, someone digs a large pit in the middle of a conference center’s hallway and we both tumble into it at the same time — probably won’t be pitching. But even assuming that I’m willing to prepare a pitch for that particular eventuality, I’m not going to memorize two different speeches. If the elevator speech is so effective at piquing interest, why shouldn’t I just use it as my pitch in my meetings with agents and editors? Since I’m already crunched for time to write, let alone to find an agent, why do I need to invest the time in preparing more than one conference pitch?”

The short answer: so you can be flexible. As I pointed out last time, you never know when — or where — you may end up pitching.

The long answer: let’s face it, it’s not as though simply memorizing a pitch, be it 3-sentence or 2-minute, is sufficient to prepare a writer for a meeting with an agent or editor who might be interested in the book. In fact, a pretty good argument could be made for not memorizing either, but reading one’s pitch from a handy piece of paper, index card, etc., to avoid the glassy-eyed, zombie-like delivery that regurgitation of memorized material.

Besides, as intrepid reader Dave likes to point out each time we discuss pitching (and bless you for it, Dave), a full-scale pitch is an interactive process, not a speech declaimed to an audience who can only clap or boo at the end. If an agent or editor likes your hallway or full pitch, she’s probably going to ask some questions.

Perhaps — and this comes as a substantial shock to most first-time pitchers — even DURING your pitch. Do you really want to be caught tongue-tied and unable to speak coherently about your book?

Stick your head between your knees until the dizziness induced by that last image passes. I’ll wait.

That’s why I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to nudge all of you away from the all-too-common notion of the three-line pitch, practiced over and over as if they were lines in a play. If you concentrate too much on the words themselves, and the short amount of time you have to say them, it’s too easy to freeze up when an unexpected question knocks you off script.

Call me zany, but in my experience, helping people learn to talk about their work professionally and comfortably in a broad variety of contexts works far better in practice than ordering people to write, memorize, and blurt a specific number of lines of text.

The rules lawyers out there aren’t satisfied with those excellent reasons, though, are they? “But Anne,” I hear some of you protest, “I can always add to my pitch on the fly, but I can hardly subtract from it. So why wouldn’t I be best off just preparing the 30-second version and using it no matter where I’m called upon to pitch?”

Okay, okay, I’ll admit it: a lot of people do use the 3-sentence elevator speech as their only pitch; to be fair, it has been known to work, just as hallway pitches work.

Just let me ask you a couple of questions: a 30-second pitch leaves quite a bit of a 10-minute appointment unused, doesn’t it? And why would you want to trade an opportunity to say MORE about your book for a format that forces you to say LESS?

I have another, more strategic reason for advising you to prepare both a short and a long pitch: not all conferences are equally open to hallway pitching. Especially, I’ve noticed, the ones that charge would-be pitchers per pitching appointment. Not too astonishing, I suppose.

Brace yourself, because I’m about to be subversive again: my experience has been that even at pay-for-pitch conferences, a brave writer can pretty much always buttonhole an agent or two after an agents’ forum or in the lunch line. It’s pretty difficult for conference-organizers to prevent any extra-appointment chance encounters between agents and the writers who came to the conference to pitch to them.

However, even at some conferences that don’t charge by the appointment, the organizers do try to discourage hallway pitching. I’ve seen many a conference brochure that featured rhetoric telling attendees that it is always rude to pitch outside a formal appointment, for example, or that forbade attendees to switch appointments after their assigned agents announced from a dais that they’re no longer accepting a particular kind of book.

Other conferences offer only a small handful of appointment times on a first-come, first-served basis, so late registrants are left with only the options of hallway pitching or not pitching at all. It’s also not at all uncommon for agents and editors to be whisked away to private parties or hospitality suites, so that they are seldom seen in the hallways for accosting purposes.

Seldom seen sober, at any rate (allegedly). Not much point in pitching to someone who thinks you’re just one of the dancing pink elephants.

Even when the rules and/or schedule do not discourage casual pitching, it can require significant bravery to place oneself at the right place at the right time. Even at fairly inclusive conferences, attendees often report feeling like comparative outcasts, unwelcome at the luncheon tables where the bigwigs hobnob. I’ve been to many a conference where the organizers and invited guests sat on one end of a banquet hall, and the paying attendees on the other.

Heck, I stopped by a conference (which shall remain nameless) a couple of years back where the visiting literati were whisked off their respective airplanes, driven immediately to a party at a local NYT bestselling author’s house for abundant merry-making, and then plied with alcohol so steadily throughout the course of the conference that the following Monday morning, one of the agents e-mailed me from New York to ask what had happened over the weekend. Rumor has it that some of the invited guests did not even show up for scheduled a.m. pitch meetings.

Which, I imagine, played some havoc with those pitchers whose assigned pitchees did not appear.

My point is, writers often pay a lot to attend these conferences, yet find themselves with relatively few pitching opportunities — and not always the ones they expected to have. Sometimes, a writer has to be pretty creative in order to snag those precious few moments for pitching, at least without coming across as obnoxious.

This is a wonderful post! I especially like the advice on what to do in the case that you’re paired with an agent who doesn’t represent your genre; which I had no idea could happen.

I do find one part of this post confusing, though. I have read on the internet (agent’s blogs, mostly) of how much agents despise being cornered and pitched to in places like elevators, hallways, bars, etc, yet you seem to be saying that this is okay. Is there a certain way to go about pitching in an elevator (for example) that would help an agent be more open to the pitch?

I find this question excellent — rather than passively accepting that what I’ve been advising is true, Penelope has thought it over, weighed advice from a variety of sources, and asked for clarification. This is a great strategy when dealing with anyone who has been immersed in the biz for a good, long while — as counter-intuitive as its ins and outs may be, once one gets used to them, their underlying logic can start to seem obvious, believe it or not.

Bear that in mind the next time you hear confusing pronouncements from the dais at a literary conference, please.

Back to the matter at hand: Penelope is quite right that there are some agents out there who hate, loathe, and detest aspiring writers asking to pitch outside scheduled appointments. Perhaps because they’ve never been in the position of a writer assigned to meet with an inappropriate match, these agents don’t believe that a polite writer would ever accost them in a hallway.

Fortunately, the relative few who feel this way — and they are few, at least amongst agents who habitually go to writers’ conferences — tend to be quite vocal about it. They post it on their websites; they announce it from the conference dais; they write articles and give interviews about it.

Thus, they have good reason to be insulted if an aspiring writer walks up to them and just starts pitching: they could hardly have made their preferences clearer. Approaching them on the fly, then, is every bit as likely to offend as picking up the phone and cold-calling an agent instead of sending a query letter. Or querying an agency that states on its website or in the standard agency guides that it is not currently accepting queries. The result of ignoring these stated preferences will be the same: instant rejection.

So here is my advice: do not, under any circumstances, attempt to pitch informally to an agent who has ever stated publicly that s/he abhors it.

How can a writer new to the biz avoid this faux pas, you ask? At the risk of repeating myself, do your homework. Performing a simple Google search on each attending agent before you head off to the conference should turn up any statements on the subject. If not, listen closely to what the various agents have to say at the agents’ forum.

Chances are, though, that you won’t turn up too many hallway-haters; it’s a common enough practice that folks who are seriously turned off by it tend to avoid the conference experience altogether. (Hey, it’s stressful for the pitch-hearers, too — listening to that many people’s hopes and dreams is mighty tiring.) After all, agents go to conferences in order to pick up clients, and it honestly is a waste of everyone’s time if they only hear pitches from the 10 writers who happen to be assigned formal appointments with them, if there are 75 writers there who write what they’re looking to represent.

Especially if 5 of those appointments turn out to be mismatches, where writers are pitching types of books that they do not represent.

If a writer’s polite about approaching, it’s usually fine. That’s a big if, though — unfortunately, there are PLENTY of rude aspiring writers up there who will simply walk up to an agent they’ve never met before and start launching into a pitch, without so much as a “Hello” or “Could you spare me thirty seconds to tell you about my book?”

Typically, when agents complain about informal pitches, that’s the kind they’re talking about, by the way, not the nice folks who approach them respectfully. You can’t really blame them for resenting the rude approach: anyone would despise being accosted right after he had just swallowed a mouthful of pasta or as she was unlocking the door to her hotel room.

Yes, it happens — but I cling firmly to the belief that none of my lovely readers would be that obnoxious.

Use your common sense, be polite at all times, and be prepared for the possibility that any given agent may have a personal pet peeve about being disturbed in some specific locale. As far as I have been able to tell in a couple of decades of going to writers’ conferences, the only UNIVERSALLY agreed-upon do-not-pitch zone is the bathroom. Other than that, whether the smoking area or the make-up mirror in the ladies’ lounge is off-limits honestly is a personal preference.

Hey, not everyone considers that part of the bathroom per se. I would err on the side of caution and avoid pitching at all between the WOMEN’S sign and the stalls, but hey, that’s me.

The trick to approaching gently lies in both timing and courtesy. If an agent is lying prone on a hallway bench with a wet towel over her face, clutching her head and moaning about a migraine, that might not be the best time to try to catch her eye, for instance. Nor is the moment just after she walks out of the room where she has been listening to pitches all day, or when she is deep in conversation with an author she hasn’t seen in 25 years.

Remember, she is under no obligation to agree to hear you out. Listening to an informal pitch is a favor, and should be treated as such.

So don’t, for instance, walk up to an agent who is laughing with her friends, tap her on the shoulder, and start talking about your book. Instead, walk up to the dais after she’s given a talk, wait politely until it’s your turn, and say something along the lines of:

“Excuse me, but I was enthralled by how you talked about your clients. I couldn’t get a pitch appointment with you, but I think you may be interested in my book. May I give you my thirty-second pitch? Or if now is not a good time, could we set up an appointment later?”

Hard to find that offensive. It clearly gives the agent the opportunity to say no, but still makes it flatteringly plain that you are taking her time seriously. Works in an elevator, too, as long as the would-be pitcher remembers that no really does mean no.

And no, in response to what some timorous souls out there just thought very loudly indeed, none of this is particularly pushy; it’s being smart about promoting your work. By preparing to be able to speak about your book in a variety of contexts, social and official both, you can be ready to take advantage of that chance meeting with the agent with whom you found it impossible to make a formal appointment.

In, say, an elevator.

The other way a hallway pitcher can avoid seeming rude is to keep the hallway pitch BRIEF. If you ask for 30 seconds of the agent’s time, do not take up more unless he asks follow-up questions.

I’m quite serious about this: don’t go overboard. This is not the appropriate time to give your full-fledged 2-minute pitch; save that for a scheduled pitch meeting or, if you’re lucky, the appointment the agent you caught in the hallway agreed to give you later in the conference.

This is where the formula we discussed last time will save your bacon:

MAGIC FIRST 100 WORDS + ELEVATOR SPEECH = HALLWAY PITCH.

If you follow this prescription (oh, there I go again; the book doctor is apparently in), you should not go over the promised 30 seconds. That means that you won’t have to keep checking your watch while you’re talking.

See why I’ve been so adamant about urging you to prepare an elevator speech in advance? An audience granted at the last minute is no time to wing it.

Out come the broken record and the dead horse again: by emphasizing the 3-sentence pitch to the exclusion of all others, I think the standard sources of writerly advice have left first-time pitchers ill-prepared to address those other vital issues involved in a good pitch, such as where the book will sit in Barnes & Noble, who the author thinks will read it, why the target market will find it compelling…

In short, all of the information contained in the magic first 100 words.

All that being said, if an agent has stated publicly (on an agent’s panel, for instance) that he hates informal pitches, steer clear — but don’t necessarily write that agent off as a possibility. Instead, send a query letter after the conference, beginning, “I enjoyed your talk at Conference X, and since I was not lucky enough to obtain a pitch appointment with you…”

But whatever you do, don’t swear off hallway pitching just because a few agents dislike being pitched informally. Not everything every agent says is applicable to all agents — nor do the agents who make such pronouncements necessarily expect everything they say in public on the subject to become codified as The Law Eternal.

Sometimes, a personal preference is just that: personal. By preparing yourself to talk about your work in a variety of contexts, you will be substantially less likely to be caught with nothing coherent to say when the pitching opportunity of your dreams presents itself.

Trust me, you will be happier in the long run if you don’t self-reject your pitch. Try it on the agent of your dreams; the results might be spectacular.

Oh, I’m sensing some impatient seat-shifting out there again, amn’t I? “I get it, Anne,” some of you say, rolling your eyes, “you believe that I’ll be happier in the long run if I prepare to be able to give my pitch in a house, with a mouse, in a hat, near a rat, and anywhere else that an agent with a successful track record selling books in my category happens to be. Fine — I’m going to practice my elevator speech AND my pitch. But I’m hardly going to forget my own name or the title of my book. I do have social skills — I don’t seriously need to practice introducing myself, do I?”

I’m sure that you have social skills that are the pride and joy or your mother under normal circumstances, but hear me out, please: while it may seem a tad silly to have to practice saying your own name, or to remind yourself to mention that your book is a novel (or a memoir, or a nonfiction book), most writers are nervous when they pitch.

I know; shocking.

Practice will help you remember to hit the important points, no matter how brief or how strange the locale of your pitching experience. Especially if you practice saying them in a number of different ways.

Yes, you did extrapolate correctly: I am seriously suggesting that you do dry runs where you have only a minute, only thirty seconds, five minutes, etc., in order to get comfortable talking about your work. And I’m not just saying that because I once found myself stuck in the same tiny airport with a very famous agent for five hours, waiting for the same flight.

True story. Nice guy.

But surprise openings are not the only reason practicing rolling with the punches is a good idea. You’d be amazed (at least I hope you would) at how many first-time pitchers come dashing into their scheduled pitch appointments, so fixated on blurting those pre-ordained three sentences that they forget to:

(a) introduce themselves to the agent or editor, like civilized beings,

(b) mention whether the book is fiction or nonfiction,

(c) indicate whether the book has a title, or

(d) all of the above.

I find this sad: these are intelligent people, for the most part, but their too-rigid advance preparation has left them as tongue-tied and awkward as wallflowers at a junior high school dance.

We’ve all been there, right?

And don’t even get me started on the sweat-soaked silence that can ensue after the 3-sentence pitcher has gasped it all out, incontinently, and has no more to say. In that dreadful lull, the agent sits there, blinking so slowly that the pitcher is tempted to take a surreptitious peek at his watch, to make sure that time actually is moving forward at a normal clip, or stick a pin in the agent, to double-check that she isn’t some sort of emotionless android with its battery pack on the fritz.

“And?” the automaton says impatiently after approximately 150 years of silence. “Are you done?”

Call me unorthodox, but I don’t think this is a desirable outcome for you.

But that doesn’t mean that you should just prepare a hallway pitch and trust your luck to be able to handle questions about it for the rest of your pitch appointment. You will be happier in that meeting if you have prepared at least the outline of a 2-minute pitch. (And yes, Virginia, we are going to talk about that next time.)

And, by the way, you should time it as you say it out loud, to make sure it can be said in under two minutes without leaving you so breathless that oxygen will have to be administered immediately afterward.

Why? Well, even more common than pitchers who dry up after 45 seconds are writers who talk on and on about their books in their pitch meetings so long that the agent or editor hasn’t time to ask follow-up questions. You really do want to keep your pitch to roughly two minutes (as opposed to your hallway pitch, which should be approximately 30 seconds), so that you can discuss your work with the well-connected, well-informed industry insider in front of you.

A pitch meeting is a conversation, after all, not a stump speech: you want it to start an interesting exchange, not to engender stony silence, right? Come prepared to talk about your work — and in terms that will make sense to everyone in the industry.

In a box, with a fox — or balanced in a crabapple tree with a dirt-encrusted good luck charm. (I thought I wouldn’t make you guess that time.)

Trust me, you can do this. I have faith in you.

Okay, now we’re coming up on the main course: the two-minute pitch. But that, my friends, is a subject for another day.

Thanks for the fabulous questions, Penelope and the rest of you who contacted me privately. (You’d be amazed at how often the floating voices I cite here are the result of ex parte approaches; just for the record, I vastly prefer that questions be posted as comments on the blog, so everyone may benefit from the answers.) Keep up the good work!

Before I launch into Pitchingpalooza’s much-anticipated step-by-step guide to approaching a real, live agent to ask if you may pitch without an appointment, would everyone please stand and salute? Today may not be a national holiday in the country at large, but here at Author! Author!, it could hardly be more important.

As of today, I have been writing this blog for six years. That’s 1,442 posts, about 5,000 questions, and so many thousands of pages of text that I actually don’t have time right now to sit down and tote them up.

The publishing world has changed quite a bit over that period, has it not? Back when we first began confabbing about the life literary, aspiring writers would complain about the necessity of promote their work to agents; published writers would grumble about the imperative to show up for readings and book signings scheduled by their publishing houses. Pretty much everyone on the writing side of the equation was vaguely disgruntled about having to put in that level of effort, or at least the fact that a first-time author’s advance no longer enabled her to take any serious time off work to make requested revisions. One might, if one was lucky, be able to purchase a used car, but unless one happened to toss off a surprise bestseller, small-but-serious authors often did not quit their day jobs until their fourth or fifth book was doing rather well.

At the time, we writers liked to get together and bemoan how much harder it was to get published and have one’s books sell well than it had been a dozen years before. Those concerns seem almost quaint now, don’t they?

In the interim, we’ve all watched in hushed anticipation as the publishing industry has been declared dead, not just once, but over and over again. Not since the advent of television had so many prophesied so much literary doom so often. Forget the fact that used book sales actually went up during this period, e-books have taken off, U.S. self-publishing releases have risen to three times the annual rate of traditional publishing (which, contrary to popular opinion, has hovered around a quarter of a million releases per year), and the increase in library patronage has almost exactly matched the decline in the new book sales market. As of 2008, we were all told, the world simply stopped reading.

Poppycock. If you look at even new book sales in the U.S. today, they are up in every major category. The book market is expanding. People haven’t stopped reading, bless their literature-loving hearts; they are simply doing it in different venues and in different formats.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we’re necessarily going to see a reversal in all or even any of the shifts in how writers are expected to relate to their books. Now, aspiring writer not only need to market themselves in an ever-more-competitive agent-seeking market, but first-time authors also frequently end up as their books’ primary pusher to the reading public at large. It’s common for an editor to tell the author of a newly-acquired to ramp up her web presence on her own, and pronto; authors often schedule their own book signings, as budgets for book tours have dried up. This, at a juncture when the average advance on a first novel often is not enough to purchase a new laptop upon which to write the second.

As editing staffs at the major publishers have dwindled, it has become commonplace for the acquiring editor not to follow the book all the way through publication, and for the new sheriff in town to want to take the book in a different direction; I’m constantly hearing from authors flabbergasted at learning that their book has just fallen into the hands of its fourth or fifth editor. Editorial staffs are more crunched for time, too, as are agencies. In the face of less hands-on support and greater competition for readers’ attention, many authors now chooses to bring in book docs like me to help whip their manuscripts into shape before plopping them into the print queue.

And because we writers are so devoted to seeing our words in print, as a group, we have done all of this largely without complaining (well, at least in front of company), during a period when we have seen advances for celebrity memoir and established bestselling novelists skyrocket, but advances for first novels drop precipitously. It’s not our imagination; it genuinely is harder than it used to be, by quite a bit.

Yet if the members of the Author! Author! community have groused about anything, it has tended to be about manners. And who could blame you? Six years ago, most first-time submitters considered it rude if their submissions were rejected by form letters at the end of two-month reading periods. I used to field incredulous comments from writers who had not yet heard back a couple of weeks after sending out queries. Three weeks used to be standard for exclusives.

Today, we barely blink at agency websites that announce up front that they will not respond at all to queries if the answer is no. Six- to eight-month turn-around times are the norm now, even if the writer grants an exclusive, and it’s not unheard-of for a writer to be left wondering nine or ten months after sending off requested materials if the manuscript is still being considered, has been rejected without notice (as is increasingly common), or just didn’t arrive in the first place.

These have been a hard six years to be a writer, but still, I have tried to remain upbeat through it all. There have been times — and now that they are behind me, I can admit this with impunity — when ambient conditions have been so bad that I have felt a trifle guilty for continuing to be your practical-minded cheerleader, urging you to keep moving forward down the path to publication. There have been weeks when I simply couldn’t bring myself to look at the lists of new book acquisitions, because I knew I would find so few first-time authors there. I had moments, days, and even months when, as I boldly answered questions about whether it is okay to contact an agent who has had your manuscript for four months to ask what’s going on (it isn’t) or whether a writer can submit adult fiction to the major publishing houses directly (you can’t) or whether it was still possible to land a first novel that didn’t include a supernatural element (it has always been, but sometimes just barely), I wondered bleakly if I should be advising you instead to rush out and become a celebrity in another field, so that you could get a book published in your chosen one.

And let’s not even talk about the many, many dark nights of the soul where I bearded heaven with my bootless cries of, “Why do I seem to be the only writing guru talking about standard format, when there actually is only one way to present a manuscript properly to a U.S. agent? And why are my mother and I apparently the only people in the nation who still wince when writers mix up farther and further, much less to, too, and two?” It’s important to have standards: surely, I felt, there must still be at least a small cadre of us who believe that the distinction between imply and infer should be recognized and maintained by all right-thinking people, even though it’s difficult even to remember now the literary outrage in the 1980s when newscasters first began using impact as a verb.

When did feeling this way stop being the norm amongst writers? I did not start out with ambitions to be a literary radical. But now that I’ve been besmirched (or honored, depending upon how one chooses to look at it) with the moniker, there’s something else I’ve been dying to get off my chest: real vampires do not sparkle.

Under any circumstances, really. Refraction requires the ability to reflect light, so a beastie who cannot admire himself in a mirror will in all probability have a hard time bouncing those light particles back at easily-dazzled virgins. Especially if he is prone to bursting into flames the instant a stray shaft of sunlight hits him.

I’m just saying. If a writer decides to present the world with a physically-limited being, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that writer to respect those boundaries.

These have indeed been trying times to be literate. Let’s hear it for all of us for hanging in there, scrambling to bolster the printed page’s apparently crumbling plaster ceiling while the same types of Chicken Littles who had placed the written word on the critical list sometime in the middle of the Boer War have run around screaming that the entire building is about to crash to the street. But people are still reading. And good writers are still producing great books.

I like to think that we here at Author! Author! have done our small part in perpetuating that. Three cheers for persistence!

That’s enough frivolity for one day, I think. Let’s get back to work.

This pitch-preparing series been a long road, hasn’t it? And not an easy one: I’ve been blithely asking each and every one of you to knuckle down and take your own work seriously enough to learn to talk about it in the language of the publishing industry. I’m aware that it’s been hard, intensive work, both time- and emotion-consuming.

But trust me: all of this effort will feel very worthwhile indeed ten minutes before your first scheduled pitch meeting. Or thirty-two seconds into your first hallway pitch.

Feeling positively faint at the prospect of the either, particularly the latter? Don’t worry; more timorous souls than you have braved the hallway pitch and survived it. Oh, they may not have enjoyed it while it was going on, but I’ve never yet had a pitching student keel over at the moment of truth.

Honest. I wouldn’t put you through the pain of creating an elevator speech unless I were very confident that you’d actually be able to put it to some use.

And yet, I feel as though I have been discussing elevator speeches — those 3-4 line gambits for use in informal pitching situations, as opposed to the 2-minute pitch reserved for formal appointments and other actual sit-down conversations — so intensely over the past few post that I may be inducing a phobia of lifts in my readers. (Not the shoes, the elevators.)

So I’m going to take out my magic wand and relieve you of a bit of that tension.

As of this moment, you have my permission to get into an elevator with an agent or editor without pitching, if you so desire. Live long and prosper.

Feel better? Good. In return, I am going to ask something else of you. Here and now, raise your dominant writing hand (or both of ‘em, if you work primarily on a keyboard) and repeat after me:

I hereby solemnly swear that I shall not have learned the magic first hundred words and elevator speech in vain. The next time I attend a writers’ conference, I will pitch to at least three agents or editors with whom I do not have a previously-scheduled appointment.

I’m going to hold you to that, you know. Oh, and you can put your hand(s) down now.

Why did I foist such a dreadful oath upon you? Because I know from experience that the only thing better than walking out of a conference with a request to send pages to an agent you like is walking out with 5 requests to send pages to agents you like.

Is that not a good enough reason for some of you? Okay, here’s an even better one: I’ve heard from no less than seven members of the Author! Author! community that at a certain local literary conference that shall remain nameless, every single available agent appointment was booked. That meant that those attendees who were mistakenly assigned to meet with agents who did not represent their book categories were simply out of luck.

Too bad; come back next year and try again. You weren’t in a hurry to find an agent for your work or anything, were you?

In instances like this, the only other alternative is hallway pitching. So even if you think that you will never, ever, EVER be able to work up the nerve to buttonhole the agent of your dreams outside of a pre-arranged meeting, I strongly recommend coming up with a plausible hallway pitch.

You just never know when you’re going to need it, do you? But even if you never (knock on wood) find yourself in the unenviable position of not being able to pitch formally at a conference whose main selling point is pitching appointments, a savvy writer honestly does need to be aware of her own book’s selling points and how to market them.

Why, you ask? Well, in this economy and the current publishing market — see above — it’s actually not all that astonishing that the Conference That Shall Remain Nameless’ appointments sold out. Writing a book is a LOT of people’s Plan B, after all. Predictably, that fact translates into higher writers’ conference attendance in slow economic times, a greater volume of queries and submissions arriving at well-established agencies, and, ultimately, significantly heightened competition for both agents and publishing contracts.

Sorry to depress you, but one of the reasons you keep visiting Author! Author! because you know I won’t whitewash the truth just because it’s unattractive, right?

So let’s take arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, shall we? Let’s talk about how to instigate a hallway pitch.

I just felt you tense up, but relax. You already have in your writer’s tool bag all of the elements you need for a successful hallway pitch — or, indeed, an informal pitch in virtually any social situation.

Did that one creep up on you? I swear, it’s true:

MAGIC FIRST 100 WORDS + ELEVATOR SPEECH = HALLWAY PITCH.

Ta da! It honestly is that simple.

You thought I was talking at random when I made you promise that at the next conference you attended, you would pitch to at least three agents or editors with whom you do NOT have a pre-arranged appointment, didn’t you? Well, gotcha: I already knew that you the skills to do it.

I’m not saying that working up the guts to do this is easy; it certainly isn’t, especially the first time. But if you watch the flow of bodies at conferences, as I do, you will notice something: except for when the agents and editors are in assigned locations — on a dais, teaching a class, in pitching appointments — or socializing amongst themselves, they have two states of social being: swamped and alone.

With virtually no significant chunk of time that cannot legitimately be categorized as one or the other.

Sit in a corner and watch — you’ll see that I’m right. In social situations, there will always be many, many more writers giving an agent or editor a wide berth, in order to avoid the possibility of having to give a hallway pitch, than walking up and saying hello. For this reason, it’s often easier than one might think to engage an agent or editor’s attention at a conference.

Especially if the people in question happen to smoke. At any literary shindig thrown within the continental United States, the designated smokers’ area outside the hotel or conference center will be positively swarming with agents looking for a light. Be there to offer it to them, strike up a conversation along with the match — and then, after a discreet interval, ask if they would be willing to spare a moment or two to hear your 30-second pitch.

As with any alone-phase approach, the key is to be unobtrusive and polite. Ask before you pitch, and always give the agent the opportunity to say she’s too tired or busy to hear a pitch right now. You can always offer to meet her later in the conference, if another time is better for her.

Your mother was right, you know: good manners are the best calling card.

Don’t be shy; you’re prepared for this now. Just walk right up to ‘em. Remember, they come to the conference in order to meet writers — writers, in fact, provide their bread and butter on a daily basis.

Actually, it’s not uncommon for an agent or editor not to know anyone at a conference, other than other agents and editors. If the agent of your dreams is standing alone, waiting for his turn in the coffee line, he may not mind at all if you introduce yourself. He might, believe it or not, actually be grateful.

(He will mind, however, if you pursue this line of logic in the bathroom, the swimming pool, the sauna, the shower in the hotel’s gym, or anyplace else that finding oneself barricaded in a small space with a stranger might be a tad, well, uncomfortable. Trust me on this one; there’s a fine line between persistent and creepy.)

Public venues are safer: hallways, seminar rooms, and banquet halls, especially just after the keynote speaker has signed off for the night. Agents tend to get swamped in those places, true, but at least you don’t need to worry about whether you’re imposing.

Another fringe benefit to choosing one of the more conventional venues: the approach is typically easier. Heck, if you choose to walk up to an agent immediately after the agents’ forum, you may even be able to stand in line with other would-be informal pitchers. In fact, if it’s your first time giving a hallway pitch, I would recommend going and standing in one of those let-me-talk-to-you line.

That way, you can watch others in action before you jump in yourself.

Where would I recommend you try after that? Moments when a formal presentation is giving way to whatever is scheduled next tend to be rife with informal pitching opportunities. Between the morning’s last seminar and the rubber chicken luncheon, for instance, or immediately after the dinner’s speaker has reclaimed her seat. Or during the break in a seminar the agent happens to be teaching, just before it starts or right after it ends.

Another popular choice: remember that bar I keep mentioning, the one that is reliably a hundred yards or less from any writers’ conference? Guess where the pros — agents, editors, authors in town to promote their books, local authors seeking companionship amongst their own kind, vampires savvy enough to realize that if they want to talk literature, it would behoove them to track down those who love to chat about it late into the night — tend to hang out in their spare moments?

Suppose that’s a good place to find pitching prospects?

One very important caveat about bar or party pitching: if an agent or editor is already engrossed in social conversation in said bar, it is considered a trifle rude to interrupt that conversation so you can give your hallway pitch. The accepted method is to act as though this were any other party, introducing yourself and chatting until someone asks you, “So, Georgette, what do you write?”

Yes, that IS the invitation you think it is. Grab it.

Don’t equivocate, as so many aspiring writers do, by sighing and giving an evasive or 20-minute answer. Instead, smile and answer like the professional writer that you are:

After you have said all this, though, both etiquette and strategy dictate that you do one thing more. Chant it with me now, campers: stop talking.

Most hallway pitchers — at least, the ones who muster the nerve to go through with it — get so excited that they have absolutely no idea when to shut up. Don’t let nervousness prompt you to keep chattering. This is a social situation, after all, not a pitch appointment: if the agent or editor who asked what you write is intrigued, trust me, she’ll ask you to continue. Or, if you really hit the pitch out of the park, she’ll hand you a card and ask you to send pages.

If she does neither, don’t push. Treat it like any other business interaction that hasn’t gone as you would like: smile, thank the agent for her time, and retreat.

The same rules apply to the bar and the smokers’ area, by the way. These are public spaces, true, but they are also designated as relaxation places, rather than places of business. If the agent of your dreams is disinclined to shop talk, you are honor-bound to honor that preference. (Oh, and if you plan to pitch in the bar, keeping the refreshments light on the alcohol is an excellent idea. I usually settle for club soda and lime — the better to keep my wits about me, my dear.)

Regardless of the locale you pick for your informal speech, stick to the script. That way, you will know for a fact that you’re not rambling on endlessly.

I’m not kidding about this. Other than serving as a reliable, professional-sounding introduction for yourself and your work, this formula for a hallway pitch has another benefit: if you put it together properly, you will not have to waste precious seconds of informal pitching time checking your watch.

The hallway pitch is self-timing, you see. With advance preparation and practice, you should be able to say all of it comprehensibly within 30 – 45 seconds, certainly a short enough time that you need not feel guilty about turning to the agent next to you in the dinner line, or walking up to her after that interminable class on nonfiction proposals, and asking if she can spare a minute to hear your pitch.

To set your conscience at ease, we’re not talking about a big imposition here: if you follow the guidelines above, you will be taking up less than a minute of her time. So you may feel professional, not intrusive, by giving your hallway pitch immediately after saying, “Please pass the rolls.”

I had I mentioned that you should always ask first to make sure it’s okay, right?

Oh, and because hallway pitches are almost invariably delivered standing, do me a favor: just before you start speaking, bend your knees a little. No need to do a deep, ballerina-style plié; just soften those joints. Pitching with locked knees can make a person get light-headed. Which means that she can faint.

Don’t think about it too much; it will only give you nightmares. As should a vampire that sparkles, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

The hallway pitch and its constituent parts are tools of the trade, nothing more. It’s up to you to use them effectively and appropriately. How? Well, as many benefits as a pre-prepared hallway pitch offers for interacting with agents and editors, the elevator speech also gives you a concise, professional follow-up after ANYONE you meet at a conference responds to your magic first hundred words with, “Wow. Tell me more.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t be afraid to give your hallway speech to other writers at the conference — it’s great practice, and it is absolutely the best way imaginable to meet other people who write what you do.

Other than starting a blog, of course. Conservatively, I’d estimate that in the last six years, it’s been the medium of my meeting in the neighborhood of 15,000 writers at various stages of their careers. Not reaching that many readers, mind you — my statistics have been stronger than that — but making actual personal connections.

Top that, sparkle boy.

The elevator speech has other uses as well. It makes a stellar describe-your-book paragraph in your query letter. There, too, you will be incorporating the elements of the magic first hundred words — minus the “Hi, my name is” part, they make a terrific opening paragraph for a query.

We have, in short, been pulling together a complex set of implements for your writer’s tool bag. A hammer is not going to be the right tool for a job that requires a screwdriver, but that doesn’t mean that a hammer doesn’t have a heck of a lot of uses.

All of which is a nice way of saying: while you might not want to give everyone you see at a conference a 5-minute pitch, you could conceivably work the magic first hundred words into any conversation. But now that you have the tools to make a hallway pitch, get out there and do it!

But let the agent finish her drink, for heaven’s sake. She’s only just gotten rid of that pesky vampire.

Smack dab in the middle of this last weekend’s Conference that Shall Remain Nameless, I received one of the most pitiful types of calls a pitching coach can get: a frantic “What do I do now?” cri de coeur from a talented aspiring writer who had just realized that she had missed one of her scheduled pitching appointments. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really; he had simply written down the wrong day in her calendar.

In the midst of trying to navigate a busy conference schedule, it isn’t all that hard to do. In fact, it’s not all that uncommon a snafu. (So in response to what a third of you thought very loudly while reading the last paragraph: yes, there are agents and editors who do read this blog, but no, the petitioning writer would not be identifiable from this description. He probably wasn’t even the only scheduled pitcher who missed an appointment at this conference; because people have been known to panic at the last minute, agents and editors are used to no-shows.)

My first thought was for him, of course, but my second thought was for you, campers. It ran a little something like this: my God, is it possible that I have never covered this situation on Author! Author! at any point within the last 6 years? (My third thought, should you care to know it: wait, aren’t we coming up on our iron anniversary any day now? Indeed we are: I posted for the first time as the Organization that Shall Remain Nameless’ Resident Writer on August 11th, 2005. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of one single thing a blogger might actually need that is made of iron, other than a hammer to batter home a point or two, but I’m open to suggestions.)

My alarmed second thought was, alas, depressingly accurate. Not only have I never written anything here about this rather common conference faux pas; a panicked would-be pitcher who realized with a start at 2:15 that his meeting with the agent of his dreams had been a 12:15 — oh, for the loss of a digit! — might end up scrolling through dozens of posts searching for an answer.

Obviously, that’s not acceptable to me; I try very hard to make this site panic-friendly. I hope all of you who are not planning to pitch anytime soon will forgive me, therefore, if I devote part of today’s post to addressing this question, so I may establish a category for it on the archive list toute suite.

The first thing to do upon realizing that one has spaced out (or chickened out; no shame in that) of a scheduled appointment with an agent or editor is to relax. The pro is not going to hate you for all eternity, nor is s/he going to regale all of her friends in the publishing industry with the tale of how (insert your name here) didn’t show up for the meeting. As I said, it’s just too frequent an occurrence to generate much umbrage — and it’s definitely too common a conference phenomenon to make a good anecdote.

“Oh, that’s happened to all of us,” the tellers coworkers will say, yawning. “Writers get too stressed out to pitch all the time.”

You feel better already, don’t you? Excellent. What you should do next is march up to the meeting-scheduling desk (or, if it’s closed, march up to the nearest well-marked member of the conference’s organizing committee) and boldly admit that you got your scheduling wires crossed. “Is there any way at all,” you should ask politely, “that I could reschedule?”

Yes, really. Try dangling your head between your knees until the urge to faint passes.

You’d be surprised how often the schedulers will say yes, provided that you are hugely apologetic about imposing upon their time. Pitchers cancel appointments all the time; they may be able to give you an abruptly emptied appointment, if you are willing to hang around on the off chance that one might open.

Why do they tend to be willing to do that? Well, rescheduling meetings is part of their job. Not only do first-time pitchers come tiptoeing up to them to whisper regrets about suddenly having developed a case of laryngitis; It’s also not unheard-of for — brace yourselves — an agent or editor to miss a scheduled meeting. In either case, they’re going to need to do some appointment-shuffling.

Head back from its second field trip between your knees yet? “But Anne,” excited pitchers everywhere gasp, “how on earth is that possible? I prepared for weeks for that meeting — what do you mean, they might not show up?”

I mean that as powerful as aspiring writers perceive agents and editors to be, they do not control flight schedules; if a plane gets delayed at JFK, they might well be late arriving at a conference in Austin. If (heaven forfend) a child gets sick, a parent might very well decide not to arrive in St. Louis to hear pitches until the next day. I’ve even heard rumors (mostly over bloody Marys the day after a conference party) that people simply oversleep.

It happens. If it happens to you, your first and second steps should be precisely the same: take a nice, deep breath, remember that it wasn’t the conference organizers’ fault, and go make a polite request to reschedule.

Believe me, courtesy counts here: if the agency decided at the last minute to send a different agent with different tastes at the last minute because the one originally scheduled has a client whose revision deadline just got moved up by a month (again, it happens), plenty of writers will be scrambling to switch appointments. Stand out from the crowd by being the one who is nice about it, especially if you are willing to stick around and wait for any last-minute openings.

Say, because someone forgot about a pitching appointment. Their gaffe may be your gain.

Please remember, though, that it’s in your interest to be polite even if the answer is no. Think about it: when a slot opens up unexpectedly three hours later, who is the scheduler more likely to flag down for it, the writer that yelled at her, or the one who commiserated with the craziness of trying to juggle so many irate people’s demands?

If you cannot make a fresh appointment (as is likely to happen, if the agent does not turn up at the conference at all), don’t lose hope; you still have two quite good options, the gutsy and the shy. The gutsy route involves doing precisely what we’ve been discussing over the last few posts: walking up to an agent or editor in the hallway or other non-bathroom conference venue, courteously attracting her attention, and asking if you can pitch.

Wow, you are prone to attacks of dizziness, aren’t you? Have you tried not locking your knees?

Actually, a pro is more likely to say yes to a hallway pitch if the requester mentions a missed pitching appointment. No need to say why you weren’t there (or to remind the agent that he was the one who didn’t show); just apologize briefly if it was your doing, and ask if you can have some time now. Or later.

Can’t imagine yourself saying it? Come on, it’s easy.

Writer (edging up to agent chatting with editor at the end of rubber chicken luncheon): Excuse me for disturbing you, Ms. Pickyperson, but may I have a moment?

Agent (clutching her coffee cup; she didn’t get a lot of sleep last night): Yes?

Writer: I’m terribly sorry, but there was a mix-up, and I missed our appointment this morning. Is there any possibility that you could make a few minutes for me? I’d be happy to work around your schedule.

Agent (shoving out a chair with her foot so she need not remove the coffee cup from her mouth): I’ll give you two minutes right now.

See? Your mother was right; politeness pays. Do be prepared to be equally polite, however, if she gives you a different time to meet, or if says no.

Writer: I’d be happy to work around your schedule.

Agent (glancing at her watch): I’m afraid that I just don’t have time. My plane leaves in two hours.

Writer (disappointed, but hiding it well): Oh, I understand. May I send you a query?

Agent (hoisting her carry-on bag): Yes, that would be fine.

Wasn’t our writer clever to suggest that last option? He could also just have gone there directly, if he was shy, skipping the face-to-face approach altogether and dispatching a query that builds upon the missed meeting.

I prefer e-mail for these sorts of missives, if the agency accepts them; that way, it’s apparent that the writer is trying to follow up as soon as possible on that canceled appointment. Again, there is no need to raise the issue of fault.

SUBJECT LINE: I missed you at the Greenwater Conference

Dear Ms. Pickyperson,

I am so sorry that our scheduled appointment at Greenwater did not happen; I was looking forward to talking to you about my romance novel, OOPS, I LOST MY CALENDAR. I hope that you are still interested in hearing about it now.

(Follow with the body of your regular query, absent the usual first paragraph.)

Perfectly polite and reasonable, isn’t it? This method can also work delightfully well for agents whom one did not have the nerve to buttonhole in the hallways.

SUBJECT LINE: post-Greenwater Conference query

Dear Mr. EyeofSharpness,

I enjoyed your talk at the recent Greenwater Conference. Unfortunately, I could not obtain an appointment to speak with you about my thriller, THE BUTLER DID IT TWICE.

(Follow with the body of your regular query, absent the usual first paragraph.)

What you should most emphatically not do — but need I add that these are the most popular choices in practice? — is either dash up to the scheduling desk to demand a fresh appointment on the spot, trail weeping after the agent in the hallways, loudly berating yourself for having spaced out on your meeting, or decide in humiliated silence to do nothing at all. None of these methods is likely to turn a missed opportunity into a saved one.

Is everybody clear on that? Please feel free to pepper the comments with follow-up questions and hypothetical situations, if not. I would much, much rather that you ask me now than send me a breathless e-mail as you hyperventilate at a conference a month hence.

Call me zany, but I prefer it when my readers can breathe. They tend to think more clearly that way.

Back to our originally scheduled programming. Next time, I shall be talking about how to make the actual approach for a hallway pitch, because it requires a certain amount of finesse not to end up as the subject of an anecdote about how pushy aspiring writers can be. Today, however, I want to bring up another common trait of the successful hallway pitcher: freshness.

As I pointed out a couple of days ago, the first commandment of a winning elevator speech is THOU SHALL NOT BORE. Actually, it’s a pretty good rule of thumb for any pitch, query letter, or submission, but if a hallway pitch is snore-inducing, the results can be instantly fatal.

Not boring is a while lot harder than it sounds, you know. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but most 3-line pitches sound a great deal alike, at least to someone who has been hearing them for three days straight.

The structure is, let’s face it, awfully darned restrictive. No wonder the people who hear them for a living tend to remember my students: the mere fact of their introducing themselves prior to pitching is out of the ordinary.

Hands up, anyone who still doesn’t understand why that agent who requested the first fifty pages of a manuscript last Saturday might not recall the details of the pitch today. (On the bright side, that agent was probably downright grateful when her eighteenth pitch appointment was a no-show; it gave her time to grab an extra cup o’ joe.)

Is that abject terror I’m sensing creeping around out there, or have the trees outside my window suddenly taken up moaning for fun and profit? “Gee, Anne,” the newly nervous pipe up, “I had no idea that part of the goal of my pitch — 3-line or otherwise — was to strike the agent or editor as original. Now I’m quaking in my proverbial boots, petrified that the agent of my dreams will burst into laughter and shout, ‘Is that the best you can do? I’ve heard that story 15 times in the last week!’”

Take a nice, deep breath; it’s the too-common structure that is snore-inducing, not necessarily any individual pitch’s subject matter. Besides, no agent or editor can possibly judge the quality of your writing solely through a verbal pitch, so even in the unlikely event that a pro said something like that to your face, it would be a response to your book’s premise or plot as you have just presented it, not to the book itself. As practically everybody in the industry is fond of saying, it all depends on the writing.

And I have even more good news: if you can make your elevator speech resemble your narrative voice, it is far, far more likely to strike the hearer as original.

Yes, you read that correctly: I’m advising you to work with your elevator speech or pitch until it sounds like YOUR writing, rather than like a pale (or even very good) replica of an author whom you happen to admire. Or like a pitch for a book that’s already on the bestseller list.

Was that giant thud I just heard the sound of the jaws of all of you who have attended conferences recently hitting the floor? “But Anne,” these astonished souls protest, cradling their sore mandibles, “you’re got that backwards, don’t you? I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard agents and editors say at conferences, ‘Oh, THAT kind of book isn’t selling anymore.’ Wouldn’t it be better strategy for me to imply that my book is just like something that is selling well right now?”

Perhaps, if your manuscript actually is similar to a current bestseller. Even if you find yourself in this position, though, you’re going to want to figure out what makes your book original and work some inkling of it into your pitch. After all, any agent who represents those types of books will have been inundated with carbon copies of that bestseller since about a month after it hit the big time.

Seriously, do you have the slightest idea how many YA vampire books Millicent the agency screener sees in any given week?

In the maelstrom of advice aimed at writers trying to land an agent, the issue of voice often falls by the wayside, as if it were not important. Or writers might even — sacre bleu! — derive the erroneous impression that their work is SUPPOSED to sound as if it had been written by someone else. To be precise, by an author on the current bestseller list.

Can’t imagine where so many aspiring writers get this idea. Unless it’s from all of those conferences where agents, editors, and marketing gurus speak from behind the safety of podiums (podia?) about how helpful it is to mention in a pitch or a letter what bestseller one’s opus most resembles.

Listen: fads fade fast. (And somnambulant Sally sells salacious seashells by the sordid seashore, if you’d like another tongue-twister.) Even after a writer signs with an agent, it takes time to market a book to editors — and after the ink is dry on the publication contract, it’s usually at least a year before a book turns up on the shelves of your local bookstore. Often two. A bestseller’s being hot now doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the same kind of voice will be sought-after several years hence.

If you doubt this, tell me: have you met many agents lately who are clamoring for the next BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY? Or even the next DA VINCI CODE? How about something that’s selling immensely well in your book category right now?

In the long run, I believe that a writer will be better off developing her own voice than trying to ape current publishing fashions. As long, that is, as that voice is a good fit for the project at hand.

That’s as true of a pitch as it is for a novel or memoir, you know. A generic pitch isn’t going to show off an honestly original voice, or even a fresh story — it’s just going to sound like two-thirds of the other pitches an agent or editor has heard that day.

See why I so discourage writers I like from embracing the ubiquitous 3-line pitch formula? The way that new pitchers are typically encouraged to do it tends to flatten original stories. Squashes some of ‘em flat as pancakes, it does.

“Wait just a minute,” that Greek chorus of conference-goers pipes up again. “I’m confused. We’ve been talking for a couple of weeks here about making my book project sound marketable. So if I make it sound like something that’s already a bestseller, why won’t that lend my pitch the shine of marketability?”

An excellent question, with two even more excellent answers. First, there’s just no getting around the fact that a pitch (or query, or manuscript) that sounds too similar to a well-known publication is inevitably going to come across as derivative. Which, in case any of you had been wondering, is why those periodic experiments where some wag tries to query and submit the first five pages of some classic like PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in order to demonstrate that good writing no longer stands a chance are not actually measuring agents’ responses to high-quality writing. At this point in literary history, the first five pages of any Jane Austen novel would strike any literate Millicent as being derivative of Jane Austen.

Not that quite a few authors haven’t made a killing in recent years being derivative of Jane Austen, mind you. So much so that even copying her style has been done.

The second answer is that what is already in print isn’t necessarily indicative of what agents and editors are looking for NOW. (If you’re not sure why, I refer you back to that section above where I talked about the usual lapse between acquisition and publication.) The third answer — I’ll throw this one in for free — is that not all published writing exhibits an original narrative voice, so copying it is going to seem even less fresh.

That “Wha–?” you just heard was Author! Author!’s own Pollyanna chorus. Take a bow, everyone. “But Anne,” these intrepid souls cry as soon as they have regained their gasped-out breath, “I’ve been going to conferences and writing seminars for years, and unless I wasn’t paying attention, published writing and good writing were used as essentially synonymous terms. At minimum, I’ve always assumed that writing needs to be good to get published. But how is that possible, if not all published work has a unique voice?”

Whoa there, gaspers — take a nice, deep breath. I’m not going out on a particularly lengthy literary limb by suggesting — or even stating categorically — that not all published writing is good.

(A long pause while everyone waits to see if a vengeful deity is going to strike me down for sacrilege.)

I seem still to be standing, so allow me to continue: books get published for all kinds of reasons. The platform of the writer, for instance, or the fact that he’s a movie star. (I’m looking at you, Ethan Hawke, not Rupert Everett — although, on the whole, I would prefer to gaze upon the latter, for aesthetic reasons.) An eagerness to replicate the success of a freak bestseller. (Ask anyone who tried to sell historical fiction in the five years before COLD MOUNTAIN hit the big time.) Having been a Pulitzer winner’s ex-husband. (One hears rumors.)

But in the vast majority of instances, a published book without a strong, distinctive narrative voice will be clear. Perhaps not full of insights or phraseology that makes you squeal and run for your quote book, but at least unobtrusively straightforward, informative, and decently researched.

You know, like newspaper writing. Clear, non-threatening, generic, ostentatiously objective, and strenuously pretending that any issue affecting humanity has two equal sides — and only two sides. But the author is not going to lean toward either. Uh-uh. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.

To have a literary voice, though, is to take a side. At least one’s own. For some stories, that’s not the best option. In fact, your more discerning professional readers have been known to wrinkle their august brows over a manuscript and ask, “Is the voice the writer chose for this appropriate for the story?”

Not all voices fit all material, after all — and if you doubt that, would you want to read a novel about a grisly series of child murders written in the light-hearted voice of a Christmas card? A political thriller whose first-person narrator is a senator by day, a hacker by night, but speaks all the time like a Barbary pirate? What about a bodice-ripper romance told in the vocabulary of a not-very-imaginative nun?

I’m guessing not.

At the moment, I work in three distinct voices: in descending order of perkiness, my blog voice, my fiction voice, and my memoir voice. (My memoir is funny, too, but as a great memoirist once told me, part of the art of the memoir is feeling sorry enough for yourself not to make light of your personal tragedies, for there lies your subject matter.)

Why not write everything in my favorite voice? Because it would not be the best fit for everything I choose to write. Nor would it best serve my literary purposes to pitch my fiction in the same voice as my memoir.

Honestly, if I used my wistful-yet-tough memoir voice here to discuss the sometimes-grim realities of how the publishing industry treats writers, I would depress us all into a stupor in 42 second flat. Because Author! Author!’s goal is to motivate you all to present your workâ€™s best face to the world, I use a cheerleading voice.

Minion, hand me my megaphone, please. I have some masses to mobilize.

One of the great things about gaining a broad array of writing experience is developing the ability to switch voices at will; you have to come to know your own writing pretty darned well for that. Iâ€™ve written everything from political platforms to fashion articles to promotional copy for wine bottles to lectures on Plato. Obviously, my tone, vocabulary choice, and cadence needed to be different for all of these topics, because the audiences were very different.

Granted, not all of those writing gigs were particularly interesting (although believe me, you need some pretty good comic timing to keep hung-over frat boys awake throughout the entirety of an 8 a.m. lecture on ancient Athenian political theory), and I would not be especially pleased if I were known throughout recorded history as primarily as the person who penned the platitude tens of thousands of people read only when their dinner date left the table for a moment and the only reading matter was on the wine bottle. Yet all of my current voices owe a great deal to this experience, just as playing a lot of different roles in high school or college drama classes might give a person poise in dealing with a variety of situations in real life.

Just as there are millions of different ways to tell any given story, there are millions of different ways to pitch it. Tone, voice, vocabulary choice, rhythm — a skillful writer may play with all of these tools in order to alter how a reader or pitch hearer receives the story.

Speaking of stories, let me tell you one that you may find enlightening.

Right after I graduated from college, I landed a job writing and researching for the LETâ€™S GO series of travel guides. The seriesâ€™ method of garnering material, at least at the time, was to pay very young, very naÃ¯ve Harvard students a very small amount of money to backpack around a given area.

Alone. All summer. In my case, throughout the wildlife-rich Pacific Northwest. I awoke once near Mt. St. Helens to find a ground squirrel tap-dancing on my head; something with awfully big paws made off with my frying pan outside of Bend, and a tourist bureau employee in Walla Walla told me I was “asking for it” by wandering around town, inquiring about motel rates. (He offered to explain over dinner what “it” was, but I declined.) My gig was heaven, however, compared to my friend who got a switchblade in his gut while asking some perfectly straightforward questions about the freshness of the fish in a bar in Barcelona.

The job was jam-packed with irony: I was supposed to do restaurant and motel reviews, but my per diem was so small that I slept in a tent six nights per week and lived on ramen cooked over a campfire. You might want to remember that the next time you rely upon a restaurant review published in a travel guide. (See earlier comment about not all published writing’s necessarily being good.)

Clearly an assignment that called for simple, impersonal clarity, right? Not so.

I can tell you the precise moment when I found my travel guide voice: the evening of July 3, a few weeks into my assignment. My paycheck was two weeks overdue, so I had precisely $23.15 in my pocket. It was raining so hard on the outskirts of Eugene that I could barely find the motel I was supposed to be reviewing. When I stepped into the lobby, a glowering functionary with several missing teeth informed that the management did not allow outsiders to work there.

â€Excuse me?â€ I said, thinking that she had somehow intuited that I was here to critique her obviously underdeveloped customer service skills. â€œI just want a room for the night.â€

“The night?” she echoed blankly. “The entire night?”

Apparently, no one in recent memory had wanted to rent a room there for more than an hour at a stretch. The desk clerk did not even know what to charge. (If you’re too young to understand why this might have been the case, please do not read the rest of this anecdote. Go do your homework, please, and don’t accept any job offers that involve hitchhiking.)

I suggested $15, a figure the clerk seemed only too glad to slip into her jeans after checking around the corner for the manager. After I deposited my backpack in my phoneless room with the shackles conveniently already built into the headboard and screams of what I sincerely hoped was rapture coming through the walls, I ran to the pay phone at the 7-11 next door and called my editor in Boston.

â€œJay, I have $8.15 to my name.” The combination of the rain noisily battering the phone booth and the angry mob urging me not to impinge upon their territory rendered his response inaudible. â€œThe banks are closed tomorrow, and according to the itinerary you gave me, you want me to spend the night a house of ill repute. What precisely would you suggest I do next?â€

He had to shout his response three times before I could understand what he was saying. â€Improvise?â€ he suggested.

I elected to retrieve my $15 and find a free campground that night, so Independence Day found me huddled in a rapidly leaking tent, scribbling away furiously in a new-found tone. I had discovered my travel writing voice: a sodden, exhausted traveler so astonished by the stupidity around her that she found it amusing.

My readers — and my warm, dry editor back in Boston â€“ ate it up. He’s an extremely respectable English professor at a well-known liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest now. He tells me that he thinks about my motel adventure every time he meets a student from Eugene.

I told you this story not merely because it is true (ah, the glamour of the writing life!), but to make a point about authorial voice. A professional reader would look at the story above and try to assess whether another type of voice might have conveyed the story better, as well as whether I maintained the voice consistently throughout.

How would a less personal voice have conveyed the same information? Would it have come across better in the third person, or if I pretended the incident had happened to a close friend of mine?

Appropriateness of viewpoint tends to weigh heavily in professional readers’ assessments, and deservedly so. Many, many submissions — and still more contest entries — either do not maintain the same voice throughout the piece or tell the story in an absolutely straightforward manner, with no personal narrative quirks at all.

In other words, presenting the story in the same flat, just-the-fact voice that dogs the average conference pitch. You’d be surprised at how many pitches for interesting, imaginative books come across with all of the stylistic verve of a police report.

Not the apex of colorful, is it? It’s the same story, essentially, but an agent or editor hearing this second account and think, â€œGee, this story might have potential, but the viewpoint is not maximizing the humor of the story. I think I’ll pass.â€ Millicent would probably just yawn and yell, “Next!”

I might not garner precisely the same reactions if I pitched this story in the style of a bestselling writer, but the end result — “Next!” — would probably be the same. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery (which I sincerely doubt), then bestselling authors must spend a heck of a lot of time blushing over how often aspiring writers pitch and submit books that bear suspicious similarities to theirs.

To an experienced pitch-hearer, the resemblance doesn’t have to be too overt for the kinship to be obvious, if you catch my drift. You wouldnâ€™t believe how many stories were told by the deceased in the years following the success of THE LOVELY BONES, for instance, or how many multiple-perspective narratives followed hot on the heels of THE POISONWOOD BIBLE.

All that being said, I’m not going to lie to you — there is no denying that being able to say that your work resembles a well-known author’s can be a useful hook for attracting some agentsâ€™ and editorsâ€™ attention, at least on the Hollywood hook level:

â€œMy memoir is ANGELA’S ASHES, but without all of that pesky poverty!â€

â€œMy chick lit manuscript is BRIDGET JONESâ€™ DIARY set in a rehab clinic!â€

â€œThe story is SCHINDLERâ€™S LIST, only without the Nazis or the death!â€

However, as the late great Mae West liked to point out (and I like to remind my readers she liked to point out), while copycats may hit the big time in the short term, for the long haul, what audiences find memorable is originality.

That’s as true for a pitch as for a manuscript, you know. Perhaps that is one of the best measures of how effective a pitch is this: three days after an agent has heard it, will he remember it on the airplane back to New York? Even if the storyline escapes him, will he remember the interesting way in which the pitcher told it, the narrative voice, the details he’d ever heard before?

In 99% of 3-line pitches, the answer is no. Partially, that’s the fault of the flattening format. Partially, it isn’t.

So at the risk of boring you, allow me to repeat the advice I’ve been hawking for the last couple of posts: the best use of your pre-pitching time — or pre-querying time — is to figure out precisely how your book is different from what’s currently on the market, not trying to make it sound like the current bestseller. A fresh story told in an original manner is hard for even the most jaded pro to resist.

Provided, of course, it’s presented in a polite, professional manner. Next time, I’ll give you some tips on how to give a hallway pitch without impinging upon the hearer’s boundaries. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Okay, so that’s not really what Our Lady of the Quips was saying to her young admirer in this particular instance. Nor, apparently, is Mae about to say, “My, but that’s an original book concept. I haven’t heard anything like it at this writers’ conference, even though I have been listening to pitches all weekend.” But clearly, the lady likes what she is hearing.

Please imbed this image in your brainpan, so you may recall it while you are pitching. In hallway pitching, as in life in general, you can tell a lot about how open a hearer is to suggestion by paying attention to expression and body language.

No, I didn’t mean that; what minds you people have. I’m talking about basic common sense here: if an agent’s eyes start to glaze over, you might want to think about cutting it short, thanking her for her time, and walking away with your dignity intact.

Yes, really. Standing there talking while your fine writer’s instincts are screaming that your hearer has lost interest can feel pretty terrible — and believe me, it will feel worse in retrospect. I’ve never attended a pitching-oriented writers’ conference where I didn’t overhear at least one poor soul say something along the lines of, “Oh, it was so awful, but I just couldn’t stop talking! I knew the answer was no, but I just kept piling on more and more detail!”

Actually, you can stop talking, and you should. Brevity is the essence of a hallway pitch, after all, so unless the agent asks to hear more — and we all hope she might — you’re going to want to stop talking after about 30 seconds, anyway. Ditto in a formal meeting, when you reach the end of your prepared (yes, we’re getting to it) 2-minute pitch.

And that’s going to be hard, if you’re like most writers, whether the agent seems to be interested or not: since this is a solitary craft, it’s not at all uncommon for a pitcher to be so relieved at being able to talk about his book to someone in a position to comment knowledgeably upon its publication prospects that he hears himself just keep babbling on and on in one continuous run-on sentence not unlike this one until he’s practically ready to perish from oxygen deprivation or the agent glances at her watch and announces it is time for her next scheduled appointment.

You even stopped breathing while you were reading that, didn’t you? Take a moment to restock your lungs; I’ll wait.

That impulse is understandable, of course, when an agent is leaning forward like a bird dog that’s spotted a partridge, eyes moist and mouth dry with mercantile lust, firing questions at you about your book. You’re going to want to remember to breathe, and you’re going to want to shut up and allow her time to speak, but it won’t be easy. It’s pretty nice to have someone looking at you as though you’re her next meal and she’s famished, at least in this context: to a savvy agent, an exciting new writer is her next meal, in a manner of speaking; she’s planning to be dining out on the proceeds of that writer’s work for years.

Shall I pause again to allow you to revel in that mental image? Or may I move on?

Unfortunately, the tendency to talk too much is not limited to pitches that a perceptive observer could tell from the other end of the hallway are going well. For many pitchers new to the game — and it is a game, lest we forget, with standing rules — the impulse to babble becomes even stronger when the pitch seems to be falling flat. While reason may be battering on the inside of the writer’s hippocampus, bellowing, “Jamie! Didn’t you hear her just say that she doesn’t think she can sell a book about tennis right now? Stop pitching, thank her for her time, and walk away!” poor James keeps hearing himself describing that ball flying back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Adrenaline kicks in either way, you see. So does, alas, that third grade teacher in all of our heads that likes to shout at us to try, try again, and harder.

That teacher was wrong. So was your Little League coach, at least as his advice applies to this type of pitching. (Oh, you thought I’d be able to resist the pun throughout this entire series?) In this game, while working up the nerve to step up to the plate is a necessary prerequisite to winning, the umpire’s not going to be judging you on effort. You’re going to have to swing. And in order to become a good player, you’re going to need to develop an eye for assessing when it’s time to let a ball go by when it’s outside your batting range.

I think I’ve mined just about all of the available ore out of that metaphor, don’t you?

There’s a reason I’ve mentioned in at least every other Pitchingpalooza post that it’s not worth your energy to pitch to an agent who does not already represent your type of book: not only are the chances of generating a request for pages much, much lower than with an agent that habitually sells manuscripts like yours; even if the former did fall in love with your work, he might not have the connections at publishing houses to sell it in the current hyper-competitive market. The same holds true for an agent who hasn’t sold a book like yours recently: editorial turnover at the major publishers has been astronomical over the last couple of years.

This is, after all, a connections-based business; your manuscript has to land on the right editorial desk before a publisher can snap it up. So when an agent who used to sell your kind of book stands up at the agents’ forum and announces that she’s not longer looking for new clients who write it, it’s in your interests to believe her.

Don’t waste energy fretting over it; just take your pitch elsewhere. Don’t even try to pitch to her informally — and if it’s a big conference, don’t be afraid to ask to change a scheduled pitch meeting.

Yes, even if you signed up to meet with her specifically because her blurb in the conference brochure said that she did represent books in your category. The literary market changes fast; trust that she knows what she can and cannot sell right now. No matter how good your pitch is, you’re not going to alter that perception.

The same logic holds true even if you don’t find out until you are already face-to-face with her that she does not handle books like yours. Or if she’s disinclined to try selling another, because she’s still chagrined that she couldn’t place the last similar manuscript. Or if she’s just broken up with a professional lacrosse player, and your novel is set at a lacrosse camp. How could you possibly have anticipated that she would never want to hear the word goal again?

Don’t bother to argue. If she’s decided it’s ix-nay on the ports-say, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Stop pitching, thank her for her time, and walk away. Oh, you’ll want to scream and engage in some heavy battery on the nearest padded surface (in a conference center, a couch is always a nice choice), but I can tell you now that’s not going to help.

Listen to me as if I were your third-grade teacher: in the long term, it’s best for your writing career if you handle this contretemps with aplomb. After all, just because that agent is not interested in your current book doesn’t mean that she won’t be fascinated by your next. Or that she won’t be opening an agency two years from now with the agent of your dreams. And had you considered the possibility that her sister might have been your future editor’s college roommate?

Your brain-batterer was right, Jamie: stop pitching, thank her for her time, and walk away.

Not only is she quite likely to be grateful for your professionalism; your response will be memorable for its novelty. You’re probably not going to be the only pitcher who runs afoul of her no net sports policy at that conference, but it’s entirely possible that you will be the only one to take the news well. She’ll appreciate that you understand the industry well enough to get that she’s not rejecting your book per se; she’s rejected the notion of spending her days reading about balls of any sort. (You should have seen her ex flying down the field after that ball. Sheer poetry. But she’s not going to think about it any more, darn it.)

You’re almost certainly going to be the only pitcher, hallway or not, who has the great good sense and courtesy to stop talking immediately after she’s indicated that she’s averse to sports stories. (Her sister’s roommate will be able to fill you in on why. For all you know, that agent covered hockey, soccer, and water polo for her college paper with a zeal that made the Journalism Gods glance down from Olympus and murmur, “Really?”) That will be smart of you: you’re sensitive enough to realize that by now, she’s darned sick of explaining herself.

And of arguing with aspiring writers bent upon foisting stories about basketballs upon her. Oh, the pitchers in question probably didn’t think of it as argument, but if they’re trying to change her categorical no into a yes, how else could she take it?

From the pro’s point of view, how many pitchers seem not to be able to hear the sound spelled N-O until it’s hit their eardrums half a dozen times is one of the great eternal mysteries. (Another is why so many writers seem to hear, “I’m sorry, but I don’t represent books in that category,” as “I am rejecting you personally. Your writing is terrible — something I know telepathically, so I shan’t bother to read it — and you should just give up. Begone from my sight, loser.” It honestly is just a professional choice.)

To be fair, though, what sounds like a no to a nice person who spends her days rejecting people doesn’t always sound like rejection to an excited pitcher in love with his book. The exchange often runs a little something like this:

Writer (cornering agent after she’s just participated in a panel): Hi. I really enjoyed your talk. You had said at the agents’ forum this morning that you were looking for murder mysteries with tough female protagonists, but I couldn’t get an appointment with you. Do you have time for a 30-second pitch for a mystery as we walk to the rubber chicken luncheon?

Writer: …a real ladies’ man, is found dead after he’s just jilted a beautiful-but-naïve journalist…

Agent (clutching her roiling abdomen): Really, there’s no market right now for novels about field sports.

Writer: …the police are stumped. Honestly, given the wide swathe he cut through the newspaper world romantically…

Agent (looking around frantically for an escape route): I wouldn’t be a good fit for this.

Writer: …the likely suspect pool seems to encompass half the female population. Knowing that the authorities have their eye on her, the journalist starts tracking down the other 57 women he had been seeing over the past month…

Writer (mentally kicking himself): Darn, I broke the cardinal rule of hallway pitching: never accost an agent on her way to the restroom. How could I have made such a basic mistake?

From the agent’s point of view, she was practically shouting, “Please don’t take it personally, but this is the last book in the world I would consider spending the next year of my life trying to sell. Go away! Now, if at all possible!” Her mother brought her up to be nice, though, so she expressed herself gently. Unfortunately, our lacrosse-loving writer got too caught up in spitting out his prepared elevator speech to pay attention to the not-so-subtle indications she was giving him that he was wasting both of their time by continuing.

How should he have handled it, you ask? Do I really need to repeat today’s mantra?

Hint: it begins with stop talking. Let’s see that exchange again.

Writer (cornering agent after a panel): May I speak with you for a moment? I really enjoyed your talk.

Agent: Thanks.

Writer: At the agents’ forum this morning, you said that you were looking for murder mysteries with tough female protagonists, but I couldn’t get a pitch appointment with you. Do you have time for a 30-second pitch for a mystery that might be right up your alley?

Agent (blood draining from her visage): I’m sorry, but I don’t represent books about sports anymore.

Writer: Oh, I’m so sorry — I didn’t know that. (Begins to back away.) Thank you for your time. I really did get a lot out of your talk.

Agent (astonished that he is taking it so well): Wait. A friend of mine just loves sports novels. She works at another agency, so I can’t give you her card, but here’s her name. (Spells her sister’s college roommate’s name for him.)

Writer (scribbling frantically on the back of his notebook): Thank you so much. And may I say that you recommended I query her?

Agent: Yes. She might get a kick out of that, actually.

Of course, it does not always work out quite that well, but as my aphorism-addicted third grade teacher might have said (over and over), you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And a stitch in time saves nine.

Oh, you thought that I was born spouting proverbs? That sort of thing is learned. In Mrs. Eliopoulos’ classroom, by a level of phrase repetition that would have made Patty Hearst’s kidnappers think, “Darn — why didn’t we think of that?”

And that, my friends, is how little girls with long braids and good eyes for curve balls grow up to become editors scrawling in margins, “You have already used this metaphor twice,” 234 pages after its first appearance and 42 pages after its second. We were the 8-year-olds visibly shaking with the effort of not screaming, “Cut that entire last speech! It was utterly redundant,” as we bent our rebellious little heads over our multiplication tables.

Paying attention to your pitch-hearer’s reactions is also learned behavior, and as such, benefits from practice. Were you able to hit the first curve ball that came flying at you?

If you are planning to engage in any pitching at all, hallway or otherwise, it’s very worth your while not to reserve the first, second, or even thirtieth time you say your elevator speech out loud for when an agent or editor is standing in front of you. Do some dry runs with kith, kin, and that guy sitting next to you right now at that café with the good tables for laptop use, taking note of any changes in their facial expressions or body language.

You may be stunned by how obvious it is when a hearer has lost interest. Or how often people will begin to zone out around the time you need to take your first breath.

Think that’s a good place to work in that startling metaphor you were saving for pp. 138, 372, and 413? Or to mention a surprising twist? Or would you rather go droning on about lacrosse?

I sense some of you tuning me out right now. “I get what you’re saying, Anne,” some conference-attendees drawl, “but I’m not planning to do any hallway pitching. Too scary. Within the context of a scheduled pitch meeting, I at least know that the agent will hear me out. So why should I waste my energies preparing to assess the nuances in a situation in which he might not?”

Two reasons, drawlers. First, if an agent does not represent your type of book, he’s actually quite likely to interrupt you to say so, even in a formal meeting. Knowing that you have the option of stopping your pitch, thanking him for his time, and walking away can spare you both the 9 1/2 uncomfortable minutes remaining in your 10-minute appointment.

Oh, pick your jawbones off the floor; it’s considered perfectly acceptable, as long as you exit politely. Do you think that agent wants to spend those 9 1/2 minutes watching you glower at him and pipe plaintively, “But why?” Or arguing about whether he really meant to say no?

Second, writers often find themselves pitching unexpectedly. You might have an opportunity to give your elevator speech at a luncheon, for instance, when an off-duty agent or editor sitting across the table asks, “So what do you write?” Or you might decide during a seminar that the agent teaching it is perfect for your book.

I speak from experience here. I once found myself pitching at a behind-the-scenes conference party at 4 am while fending off a senior editor from a major publishing house’s astonishingly persistent attempts to convince me to accompany him into a nearby hot tub. Something about his approach did not strike me as completely professional. Or so I surmised from his body language, facial expression, and the fact that he kept tugging my arm in the direction of steam.

But when one’s agent is at one’s elbow, hissing, “Give him your pitch,” a good writer obeys. Then one gets the heck out of there. As Mrs. Eliopoulos would have been happy to tell anyone several dozen times, discretion is the better part of valor.

Since informal pitch opportunities generally entail speaking up gamely under less-than-ideal circumstances, it can take some guts to take advantage of them. Let’s face it, not every writer has the pure, unadulterated moxie to stop a well-known agent in the buffet line and say, “I’m sorry to bug you while you are nabbing your third dessert, but I’ve been trying for two days to get an appointment with you. Could you possibly spare thirty seconds after dinner to hear my pitch?” And, frankly, not every conference organizer is going to be thoroughly pleased with the writers brave enough to do it.

Allow me to let you in on a little professional secret, though: if you did an anonymous poll of agented writers who found representation by pitching at conferences (including, incidentally, your humble correspondent), most of them would tell you that they’ve engaged in hallway pitching. Shamelessly. And constantly, at conference after conference, until they have landed an agent.

“Quitters never win,” Mrs. Eliopoulos used to say. “And winners never quit.”

Statistically, it makes perfect sense: the more agents to whom one pitches, the greater one’s probability of being picked up. (In the signed-by-an-agent sense, mind you; stop thinking about that editor at the publishing house that shall remain nameless. In his defense, he claimed he had just broken up with his girlfriend — a lacrosse player, no doubt.) At most conferences that offer pitch meetings, writers are given only one or two appointments, so simple math would tell us that those who generated their own extra pitching opportunities would be more likely to land agents.

That level of persistence need not involve being rude to anybody. I know a perfectly respectable author who landed his agent by the simple expedient of beginning at one end of a conference dais immediately after a panel and moving sideways like a crab for the next 15 minutes, pitching to every agent remotely likely to be interested in his writing. The agent of his dreams turned out to be waiting in the eighth chair, her eyes glazed over after listening for several minutes to a writer talking about a book that she knew she did not have the connections to sell.

How did he pull that off without alienating anyone? By paying attention to subtle hints like facial expression, eye-glazing, and the agent in front of him saying, “Sorry, that’s not my cup of tea,” to tell him when to stop pitching, thank her for her time, and walk away.

Sensing a pattern here? I hope so. All too often, pitchers perceive themselves to be entirely powerless in the situation, supplicants at the feet of a whimsical monarch magically empowered to speak for the entire publishing industry. But that’s just not true. A pitch is a conversation, and as a participant in it, you may chose to terminate it if you feel it is not going well.

Remember that, please, if the agent you picked for your field hockey romantica manuscript because her blurb mentioned that she successfully represented LACROSSE THE RIVER LOVE, NETTED BY PASSION, and HEY, LADY, MY STICK HAS A NET ON IT. Don’t torture her or yourself by pitching a book she has already told you she will not consider representing.

Move on, even if that means working up the nerve for unplanned hallway pitching. You came to that conference to find an agent, didn’t you? As long as you are polite, that goal need not be unattainable simply because you didn’t know that agent’s preferences had changed when you signed up to pitch to her.

Oh, dear, I said goal, didn’t I? I beg your pardon; I’m going to walk away now. Keep up the good work!

You guessed it, long-time readers of this blog: we’re about to launch into one of my cherished (if a bit heavy-handed) exercises in expanding your expectations. So — what do you think this nebulous picture depicts?

Give it some thought. In the meantime, do you mind if I get back to the matter at hand?

Thanks. For the past few posts, I’ve been writing about the elevator speech, the ubiquitous 3-line pitch’s prettier fraternal twin.

Prettier in what sense, you ask? Well, in the most important way a verbal pitch can be: it’s more likely to impress a hearer. Unlike the usual 3-line pitch, a plot summary whose primary (and sometimes only) virtue is brevity, an elevator speech is an introduction of an interesting protagonist with an interesting goal facing interesting opposition, preceded by a polite request to pitch, the writer’s name, and the book category.

What’s the difference in practice, you ask? An excellent question. Here is a fairly representative specimen of the kind of thrown-together 3-line pitches agents and editors often hear at writers’ conferences.

Agent: Hi, I’m Emma Perfectagentforyou. Won’t you sit down?

Writer (drawing in the kind of breath Olympic swimmers take immediately prior to diving into a pool): My book’s about an old folks’ home with a problem: people keep getting murdered in various ways; no one knows why. Someone’s got to do something about it, or else the town’s elders — who want the land the retirement home is sitting on to sell to a greedy developer in exchange for major bribes — will close the place down, and fast. By the end of the book, my heroine has foiled the developers, shot the mayor, and, along with all of the surviving circle of friends from the retirement home, has taken over the city council — which had been corrupt for decades due to a hushed-up bribery scandal decades before that only the residents of the home are old enough to remember, so only they can catch the crooks.

That’s not a terrible pitch, certainly; at least we know in general terms what the book is about. But it’s awfully vague, and it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Who is the protagonist, for instance? In what era is the book set? Does it have a title? And what kind of a book is it?

Surprised that a plot summary laden with twists could leave so much relevant material out? Don’t be — and don’t judge our intrepid writer too harshly. She’s out there trying, and that takes bravery. Besides, she’s never heard a professional writer pitch a book before. All she knows — and see if this sounds at all familiar — is that the conference materials said that the pitch could not be more than three sentences long.

Thus all of those semicolons, commas, and dashes. Technically, it’s only three sentences long; count the periods. But how would one say all of that in a 30-second hallway pitch?

Go ahead, try it. In my many-hued past, I used to declaim Shakespeare on a regular basis, but even my lungs could not get through all of that in less than five breaths and still produce remotely comprehensible words.

And at the risk of terrifying you, that’s the dilemma facing the conscientious pitcher who takes the time to craft something that seems to fit the bill. Although it pains me to say it, most pitchers do not prepare adequately — or, if they do, they often write their pitches so close to their pitching appointments that they don’t have time to practice.

The results, I’m afraid, are seldom pretty. Let’s take a peek at how the attempt usually plays out — no, I don’t have the heart to put you through that. Instead, let’s take a gander at a relatively unstressful pitching session.

Agent: Hi, I’m Emma Perfectagentforyou. Won’t you sit down?

Writer (sits, clutching notes in a death grip): Oh, I’m so nervous.

Agent: That’s okay. Tell me about your book.

Writer: The protagonist of my fiction novel –

Agent (under her breath): All novels are fiction.

Writer: — is a singer who lives in a retirement home where people die all the time, only now, they are dying really close together; the manager is so scared of being sued by people’s relatives that he keeps threatening to close the place — that’s okay with the town officials, though, because they want to condemn the place, anyway, so greedy developers can snap up the land that’s very valuable since it’s right next to the vacant lot that the corrupt mayor knows is about to be bought by a major movie star who, like Greta Garbo, just wants to be alone. The people in the retirement home get very scared, because they have nowhere to go, so she –

Agent: Your protagonist, you mean?

Writer (jarred into losing her place in her memorized speech): What?

Agent: Is your protagonist the one who does something about it?

Writer (frantically shuffling through pages of notes to find the latest draft of her pitch): Um, sorry. (All she turns up are drafts 2 and 3. Decides to wing it.) So my protagonist — yeah, she’s the one — decides to organize the old people into a posse, but there’s this other woman doesn’t like her and opposes it. And oh, I forgot to mention, in this town, there’s a law that states that everyone must be armed at all times. So it’s not like going against the town’s elders isn’t dangerous. And then there’s this subplot about the mayor’s niece, who’s really a good person, and she’s in love with the grandson of one of the people in the old folks’ home, and they want to run away together, but they don’t have the money. So when she gets pregnant –

Agent: Well, it doesn’t really sound like the kind of book I can sell in this market.

Frozen with empathetic horror yet? You’d be astonished at how often nervous pitchers sound like this, especially if they have not taken the time to prepare. Or when they do, they misapply their time, believing that an agent will be more impressed by a memorized pitch than one read off an index card. (That’s seldom true, incidentally; agents know that writers tend to be shy. When in doubt, read it.) So if they get interrupted by a perfectly reasonable question, they often panic and lose all sense of their planned structure.

See now why I have devoted so many posts to drilling you to be able to answer questions about your book? If you prepare for a conversation, rather than lecture, you’re less likely to be thrown.

Admittedly, even well-prepared pitchers often feel disoriented in impromptu pitching situations. Are you up for another harrowing example?

Writer (to fellow attendee): Isn’t that Emma Perfectagentforyou walking into the women’s room? I loved her speech at the agents’ forum, but I couldn’t get an appointment with her. Maybe I can catch her…

(Dashes down lengthy hallway, bowling over several prominent memoirists. She tracks down the agent of her dreams waiting in a long line.)

Writer (grabbing her arm): Emma? I want to give you my pitch. Emma lives in a retirement home, and her friends are dying around her. Normal, you say? Not nearly. It turns out that the corrupt mayor has been bribing the manager to poison the water supply –

Agent (sidling away): Oh, it’s my turn. Bye!

(Writer turns away, crestfallen, and returns to the hallway. Several minutes later, Emma and another agent emerge from the restroom, chatting in confidential tones.)

Agent (veering sharply in another direction): Oh, God, there’s that rude writer I was telling you about.

“See?” those of you who have heard that agents universally hate hallway pitching crow triumphantly. “That’s why I would never pitch outside a formal meeting. Even if I accidentally got matched with an agent or editor who did not handle my kind of book, I would be terrified of offending someone!”

Well, you should never, ever, EVER try to pitch in the bathroom (or to an agent whose trajectory and worried facial expression might lead you reasonably to conclude that he might be headed in that direction), but at most conferences, there are perfectly acceptable moments to ask to give your elevator speech.

The key, however, is to ask. Unlike in a formal pitch meeting, where the agent or editor is obliged to listen to a pitch, agreeing to a hallway pitch is in fact granting a favor to a perfect stranger.

Agent (sitting on dais immediately after teaching a seminar): Well, that was a vigorous question-and-answer session.

Writer (approaching respectfully): Excuse me, Ms. Perfectagentforyou, but Brilliant McAuthorly, and I wanted to tell you that I just loved your speech during the agents’ forum.

Agent: Why, thank you, Brilliant.

Writer: You really sound like a great fit for my book, but I could not obtain an appointment with you. Would you have thirty seconds to spare for a literary fiction pitch, either now or at any other time you say?

Agent (glancing at her watch): Sure, if it’s quick.

Writer (delighted): Thank you so much. 81-year-old Emma Trenchfoot is increasingly lonely these days, because every week, another of her friends at the Buona Notte Opera Diva Retirement Retreat dies under odd circumstances. So many have perished that the local authorities are threatening to close the place down. Can intrepid Emma save her last few beloved friends before the CONDEMNED sign swings from the front door?

Agent (astonished that for once, a 30-second pitch actually took only 30 seconds to deliver): Wow, that sounds interesting. (Digs out her business card.) I’m afraid I have to run off to a meeting now, but why don’t you send me the first 50 pages?

Writer (clutching the card as if it were the Holy Grail): Oh, of course. Thank you. (She backs away immediately.)

I’ve sensed raised hands out there in the ether since the end of Brilliant’s elevator speech. “But Anne,” meganovelists everywhere shout, “there’s so much more to the story! Why did Emma say yes, when all Brilliant did was lay out the basic premise, introducing her protagonist as an interesting person facing an interesting challenge with quirky specifics after having clearly stated what kind of book it was…oh, never mind.”

Exactly. Yes, there’s more to the plot than this — but Ms. Perfectagentforyou is just going to have to ask a follow-up question (preferably along the lines of, “Wow, that sounds interesting — tell me more,” or, better still, the aforementioned “Would you send me the first 50 pages?”) in order to find out.

The elevator speech is just a tease. To extend my meal metaphor from a few days back, if the keynote is the amuse-bouche, designed to whet the appetite of the agent or editor, the elevator speech is the first course, designed to show that the chef has talent prior to the entrée, the full-blown 2-minute pitch.

Let me pause to make absolutely sure that every human being within eyeshot of this page understands that: the elevator speech should not be confused with a formal pitch — it’s specifically designed for informal settings. However, If the elevator speech is not finely prepared and delectable, the hearer is not going to stick around for the main course.

If you wow him with the fish in round one, he’s going to clamor for the steak in round two.

That’s the theory, anyway. More commonly in a hallway pitch, an agent in a hurry is going to gobble up the fish and pass on the steak, opting to skip the 2-minute pitch altogether in favor of, well, continuing to walk down the hall.

Don’t let that outcome discourage you; it’s not always bad for the pitcher. As long as the agent hands you a business card and asks you to send pages before he moseys, why should you mind not serving the second course?

Yes, yes, I know: this runs counter to the prevailing wisdom. We’ve all heard that pitchers are allowed to say only three sentences to an agent in total and that those three sentences should summarize the entire plot, as if that were possible. (What about “Hello?”) We’ve also all been told that the purpose of the pitch is to sell the book, not to tempt an agent or editor into reading it.

Believing that is a pretty infallible means of making pitchers feel lousy about themselves, because it’s setting the performance bar almost impossibly high. Those of you who have worked your way through this series, chant it with me now: the SOLE purpose of a verbal pitch is to convince the hearer to ask to read the book in question.

Or at least a part of it. If you’re defining pitching success in any other way, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Everyone got that, or should we chant it a few hundred more times? I can stay here all day, people.

All throughout the sterling set of examples above, I could sense a certain pervasive dissatisfaction amongst writers of nonfiction. (Bloggers develop tremendously acute senses of hearing, you see. That rumble I just heard was slight settling on mile 32 of the Great Wall of China.) ”This is all very well for a novel,” memoirists and nonfiction writers grumble, “but how does all this apply to a MY book?”

Calm your grumbles, oh memoir-writers and pursuers of fact. How does all this theory apply to nonfiction?

Well, at the risk of seeming redundant, the basic principle is the same for a nonfiction book as for a novel: to intrigue the hearer into asking follow-up questions, or even the entire 2-minute pitch.

Which I am GETTING TO, people. Hold onto those proverbial horses.

But while a novelist can simply spring her premise on the nearest agent or editor within shouting distance, the nonfiction writer needs to use a little more finesse. Especially if the book in question happens to be a memoir.

Although, to be fair, a memoir’s elevator speech can be structured rather similarly to a novels. The questions it addresses are alike, after all:

(a) Who is the protagonist and what is the context in which s/he exists?

(b) What is her/his goal, and what is at stake if s/he does or does not reach it?

(c) What obstacles does s/he face in reaching it?

A good elevator speech for other kinds of nonfiction book also answers some very specific questions, but not the same ones. Here, the goal is to demonstrate the book’s importance to its target readership and the writer’s platform.

(a) What is the problem the book is seeking to solve?

(b) Why is it important to the target reader that it be solved? (Or, to put it another way: what will the reader get out of seeing it solved by this book?)

(c) Why is the writer the best possible person in the world to address this question in print?

Yes, these are pretty wide-ranging questions, but remember, the goal here is not to provide the definitive answers. In the elevator speech, you will want to say just enough to intrigue the hearer into asking either to hear the full-blown pitch or to see some pages. As with a novel, it’s not in your interest to tell so much about the book that the agent or editor to whom you are speaking feels that you have told the whole story.

In other words — and you may have heard this somewhere before — the elevator speech is the first course, not the entrée. No version of a pitch should give the impression that there’s no need to read the book.

So here’s a word to the wise: don’t try to stuff too much information into your elevator speech.

Unfortunately, this is often a much-needed bit of advice. I can tell you from long experience as a pitching coach: many, many pitches do convey precisely that impression, because they go into far, far too much detail. Heck, I’ve heard pitches that took 15 minutes to get to the action or argument on page 36.

In a manuscript with 482 pages.

Trust me, you will want to leave enough of a question hanging in the air that your listener will say, “Gee, that sounds intriguing. Send me the first 50 pages,” rather than, “God, this person has been talking for a long time; I was really hoping to grab some lunch. I wonder if room service would bring a drink and a snack to me in the appointment lounge, so I may swiftly depart this hallway, doubtless leaving this writer still talking in my wake.”

I can already feel those of you who’ve pitched nonfiction at conferences shaking your heads. “Yeah, yeah,” these weary souls point out, “obviously, I want to make the book sound like an interesting story. But as any NF writer who has ever come within 30 feet of an agent or editor can tell you, the first question anyone in the industry asks us is, So what’s your platform? If you aren’t already famous for being an expert on your subject matter, or famous for being famous, it seems as though they don’t even listen to the story you’re pitching.”

Well, in my experience, that’s not quite true — most of them will listen to the story a NF writer is pitching. But you’re quite right that they will want to know right off the bat what that writer’s platform is.

A platform, for those of you new to the term, consists of whatever in the writer’s background, experience, birth, credentials, connections, research, etc. that would enable her agent to say truthfully, “Oh, the author is an expert in this area.” Or, at any rate, to be able to claim that people in the general public will already recognize the author’s name.

Which isn’t, contrary to what many aspiring writers believe, always a matter of celebrity. Basically, your platform is the answer to the question why are you the best-qualified person in the universe to write this book?

Hmm, that sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?

And no, for a memoir, simply being the protagonist who lived through the events described in the book is not necessarily a sufficient platform, in the eyes of the industry. If you’re a memoirist who is planning to pitch, you’re going to need to come up with a better answer for, “So what’s your platform?” than “Well, I lived through it,” or the ever-popular, “It’s about ME.”

Sorry to be the one to break that to you. Strange but true, in the literary world, merely being the protagonist doesn’t necessarily render someone the top pick for writing the protagonist’s life story. As the pros say, it all depends on the writing.

So yes, memoirist, you should be prepared to be asked about your platform — in fact, you should work that information into your pitch. Having successfully pitched a memoir myself, I’m not a big fan of allowing an agent or editor to ask that particular question. In other words, I believe that any really good NF pitch should establish the author’s platform as the best conceivable writer of the book, BEFORE anyone thinks to ask about it.

Why? Well, in the first place, including some mention of the platform in an elevator speech (or a formal pitch, for that matter) demonstrates that the writer not only understands how the nonfiction market works, but is aware that it is different from the fiction market. Since it is significantly less time-consuming for an agent or editor to work with a writer who is already familiar with what will be expected of her, publishing savvy is a selling point in and of itself. (In the event that anyone out there doesn’t understand how it works, I would strongly recommend a quick perusal of the START WITH THESE POSTS IF YOU ARE BRAND-NEW TO PUBLISHING category on the archive list at right before you prepare your pitch; it will make your task much easier.)

In the second place (and thus taking the silver medal), stating your platform up front greatly increases the probability that the hearer will take your argument seriously. Just human nature, I’m afraid, and the reality of the publishing world.

See why I made you figure out what your book’s marketing points, including your platform, before I let you anywhere near anything that remotely resembled a pitch? During a hallway meeting is a lousy time to brainstorm about your platform, after all — and not being prepared leaves you prey to nagging doubts when agents and editors say from the podium (as someone invariably does at every writers’ conference ever given atop the earth’s crust), “Well, unless a writer has a good platform, it’s not possible to sell a nonfiction book.”

I can’t imagine how aspiring writers hearing this could have derived the impression that only the already-famous need apply, can you?

The fact is, though, the vast majority of NF books are written by non-celebrities — and even by people who aren’t especially well-known in the areas in which they are experts. Literally millions of NF books are sold each and every year, and few of their authors are the Stephen Hawkings of their respective fields.

How is that possible, you ask? Let me whisper a secret to you: great platforms are constructed, not born.

If you’re not certain why you’re the best-qualified — if not the only qualified — writer currently wandering the face of the earth to tap out your NF book, you’re going to be pitching at a severe disadvantage. (If you’ve been feeling queasy for the last few paragraphs because you don’t know what your platform is, run, don’t walk to the right-hand side of the page, and check out the posts on YOUR BOOK’S SELLING POINTS, PLATFORM, and NONFICTION MARKETING categories for a bit of inspiration.)

I’m sensing some uncomfortable shifting in seats out there. “But Anne,” those noisy memoirists from earlier protest, “this sounds like a whole heck of a lot of work without a very clear pay-off. Obviously, my memoir is about ME — why do I have to prove that I’m the best-qualified person to write about MY life?”

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet, as I’ve pointed out many times in this blog, a memoir is always about something in addition to its protagonist.

In order to establish your platform, you will need to demonstrate that you’re qualified to write authoritatively on that background issue, too. Because, you see, it just doesn’t make sense to expect the person hearing your pitch to guess what your background is.

For example, if you grew up in a traveling circus, you would probably have some pretty interesting stories to tell — but that will not necessarily be obvious to an agent or editor to whom you’re pitching. What are they, psychic?

But if you demonstrate that your first-hand knowledge renders you a credible expert with an intriguing, unique point of view on the subject, they won’t have to guess, will they? Make it clear that your point of view is not only unusual, but one that readers who already buy books on this subject will have encountered before.

As with a novel, introducing specific, unusual details is usually the best way to achieve this. For instance, it would not necessarily establish your platform as a circus kid to say, “Look, I was the little girl watching from beneath the bleachers,” because to an outside observer, that little girl wouldn’t necessarily have seen anything different than what any audience member did. If you were more specific about how your experience was unique, however, you more or less automatically sound credible: “By the time I was five, I had graduated to riding the lion during the circus parade,” for instance, would be a real show-stopper in a pitch.

Once you’ve figured out what makes your point of view unique, making the case that you are the best person currently living to write about it will become substantially easier, no? (But please, if you love me, do not fall into the trap of describing relatively common attributes or experiences as unique just because they overwhelming majority do not share them. Unique means one of a kind.)

And please don’t wait until you’re actually in a pitching situation to ponder why your take on the larger issues in your memoir is different and better than others’, I implore you. It’s much, much smarter to think in advance about what makes your point of view unique and work it into your informal AND your formal pitches than to try to wing it in the moment. And if that’s not sufficient incentive, here’s more: by including some indication of your platform (or your book’s strongest selling point) in your elevator speech, you will forestall the automatic first question: “So what’s your platform?”

This same strategy will work with any NF book, believe it or not. What is unusual about your take on the subject — and does your special point of view offer your reader that other books in this are do not?

Don’t boast — be specific and practical. Demonstrate what the reader will learn from reading your book, or why the book is an important contribution to the literature on your subject.

With a strong grasp of your selling points to build upon, you can use your elevator speech in much the same way that a novelist might: to provide specific, vividly-drawn details to show what your book offers the reader. Make it clear in your elevator speech what your book is and why it will appeal to your target market. Here’s an example:

Swirling planets, the Milky Way, and maybe even a wandering extraterrestrial or two — all of these await the urban stargazing enthusiast. For too long, however, books on astronomy have been geared at the narrow specialist market, those readers possessing expensive telescopes. ANGELS ON YOUR BACK PORCH opens the joys of stargazing to the rest of us. Utilizing a few simple tools and a colorful fold-out star map, University of Washington cosmologist Cindy Crawford takes you on a guided tour of the fascinating star formations visible right from your backyard.

See? Strong visual imagery plus a clear statement of what the reader may expect to learn creates a compelling elevator speech for this NF book. And did you notice how Professor Crawford’s credentials just naturally fit into the speech, obviating the necessity of a cumbersome addendum about platform?

Didn’t I tell you that it was all about finesse?

Try reading Prof. Crawford’s elevator speech out loud: feels a little awkward to be tooting the author’s horn quite that much, doesn’t it? We writers tend to be rather unused to describing our own work in such unequivocal terms, so I always advise trying it out for oneself — say, a few hundred times.

There’s nothing like practice for learning the ropes, so it’s not a bad idea to buttonhole a few like-minded writers and figuring out elevator speeches for their books, too. I know it sounds wacky, but learning to pitch other people’s books is a great way to get comfortable with the style.

Remember, your elevator speech should be entertaining and memorable, but leave your hearer wanting to know more. Don’t wrap up the package so tightly that your listener doesn’t feel she needs to read the book. Questions are often useful in establishing why the book will be important to the reader:

EVERYWOMAN’S GUIDE TO MENOPAUSE: “Tired of all of the conflicting information on the news these days about the change of life? Noted clinician Dr. Sal Solbrook simplifies it all for you with her easy-to-use color-coded guide to a happy menopausal existence. From beating searing hot flashes with cool visualizations of polar icecaps to rewarding yourself for meeting goals with fun-filled vacations to the tropics, this book will show you how to embrace the rest of your life with passion, armed with knowledge.

Okay, here’s a pop quiz for those of you who have been following this series from the beginning: what techniques did NF pitcher Solbrook borrow from novel pitching?

Give yourself at least a B if you said that the writer incorporated vivid sensual details: the frigid polar icecaps, the twin heat sources of hot flashes and tropical destinations. And make that an A if you noticed that the savvy pitcher used a rhetorical question (filched from Dr. Solbrook’s keynote, no doubt) to pique the interest of the hearer — and double points if your sharp eye spotted the keywords agents love to hear: happy, passion.

Extra credit with a cherry on top and walnut clusters if you cried out that this elevator speech sets up conflicts that the book will presumably resolve (amongst the information popularly available; the struggle between happiness and unhappiness; between simple guides and complicated ones). Dualities are tremendously effective at establishing conflict quickly.

Speaking of odd sensual details and dualities, have you come to any conclusion about the picture at the top of this post? Looks kind of like light reflected off water, doesn’t it? Or a very heavy rain falling through the air, perhaps?

Actually, it’s a photograph of a granite-tiled patio on a sunny day. Completely different level of hardness than water or air, similar effect.

Which only goes to show you: first impressions are not always accurate. Sometimes, a surface that initially appears to be wavering is as solid as stone; sometimes, an author who doesn’t at first seem to have many qualifications to write a book turns out to have precisely the right background for presenting a fascinating new take on the subject.

The world is a pretty complex place. And that a writer doesn’t have to be a celebrity to have a good platform.

More thoughts on constructing and delivering engaging elevator speeches follow anon, of course. Keep up the good work!

Before I launch into a rather necessary explanation of the rather odd picture above, allow me to send out a quick word of advice to any of you out there who might happen to be planning to spend this coming weekend at a literary conference in my general geographical area: no matter what every fiber of your being may feel in the moments just after a successful pitch, you do not need to send requested pages to agents and editors right away. In fact, acting on that impulse is generally a really bad idea — especially if you, like so many well-intentioned aspiring writers before you, are in such a rush that you spring for overnight postage.

Yes, you read that correctly. Unless an agent asks you point-blank to overnight something, just don’t do it; it won’t speed up the reading process. So why shell out the quite substantial extra dosh?

Yet saving money, while in itself nice for a writer, is not the only reason that obeying that first hyper-excited impulse is not a good idea. Any guesses why?

That’s right, campers: almost without exception, aspiring writers who pop requested materials into the mail or e-mail them right after the request don’t have time to read their submissions IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and ideally, OUT LOUD.

And why might that be a very, very costly choice? Because this is the single best way to weed out any gaffes that might get the submission shifted into the reject pile.

Some of you conference-goers are huffing at the very idea of delay, aren’t you? “But Anne,” those who are just itching to get that manuscript out the door protest, “I whipped my submission into apple-pie order before the conference, and I’m terrified that the requesting agent will forget who I am if I wait. All I have to do now is stuff it in an envelope or hit the SEND key, and I’m on my way to fame and fortune!”

Legitimate concerns all, but listen: if you pitched at a large conference, chances are that the agent or editor is not going to remember the details of your pitch, anyway; that’s why they take notes, so they know why submissions are landing on their desks two months from now. Requests for materials take months and months to expire.

So since you have time, why not make sure your submission is buffed to a high gloss? You get only one chance to impress that agent, you know.

Reading every syllable of it out loud is far and away the best means of catching the little problems that might dull the shine, such as typos, logic problems, and missing words. Not to mention that pet peeve that the requesting agent specifically mentioned at the conference as an automatic rejection offense. Proofing your work on a computer screen is not an adequate substitute, as all the typos that keep cropping up in newspapers and magazines attest: since most people read a backlit screen about 70% faster than words on a printed page, it’s just too easy for the eye to glide right past a fixable problem.

When you’re excited and in a hurry, of course, that’s even more likely to happen. And lest any of you doubt that, here’s a discussion amongst some very savvy writers about the manuscript-killers they’ve let slip by in their rush to get requested materials to agents.

Whether you heed this advice — and I know from experience that a hefty proportion of you won’t — make sure to follow this part: send precisely what the agent or editor asked to see — no more, no less. I don’t care if the cliffhanger of the century falls two lines into page 51; if the requester asked to see the first 50 pages, that’s all you get to send. Agents are wise to the ways of manuscripts, after all: they won’t be shocked to see that page 50 isn’t the end of a chapter. Heck, stopping there may well cut off the tale in mid-sentence.

Oh, and don’t forget to write REQUESTED MATERIALS on the outside of the submission packet or in the subject line of the submission e-mail. That will help prevent your pages from ending up in the wrong stack. For a few more salient tips on how to polish and package your work, please see the aptly-named HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUBMISSION PACKET category on the archive list at right. For those of you stymied by logistics, the posts in the MAILING REQUESTED MATERIALS category might prove enlightening.

But enough of this frivolity. On to the marble lady and companions.

While flipping through my photos from my writing retreat in southwestern France — yes, I shall be continuing to rub that one in for the foreseeable future; thanks for asking — I stumbled across this photo of a genuinely strange fountain in Carcassonne. Leaving aside for the moment the question of why that astoundingly well-fed pigeon is attacking the mermaid, I ask you: when’s the last time you saw a mermaid who didn’t have to ride sidesaddle?

Seriously, wouldn’t you have thought that was logistically impossible? What does she have, a bifurcated tail like the mysteriously frond-like stems on the siren in the old Starbucks logo?

Contrary to what some of you may be thinking, I’m not merely alerting you to the tail enigma out of the fevered musings of a sleep-deprived mind. No, the watery trollops above are illustrating a point crucial to our ongoing series: the ordinary presented with a twist is inherently more memorable than the ordinary.

Bear that little nugget in mind as we continue to make our way through the mysteries of pitching. It will serve you well, I assure you. In the meantime, I promised you examples of good elevator speeches, and examples you shall have.

Frankly, I wish those conference brochures that advise writers not to dream of speaking more than three consecutive sentences about their manuscripts would deign to include a few concrete examples. Just as it’s more difficult to write a winning query letter if you’ve never seen a well-crafted one before than if you have, it’s pretty hard to construct a pitch in a vacuum. Since good elevator speeches vary as much as good books do, it’s a trifle hard to show what makes one work without showing a few of ‘em in action.

To get the ball rolling, here is an elevator speech for a book you may already know:

19th-century 19-year-old Elizabeth Bennet has a whole host of problems: a socially inattentive father, an endlessly chattering mother, a sister who spouts aphorisms as she pounds deafeningly on the piano, two other sisters who swoon whenever an Army officer walks into the room, and her own quick tongue, any one of which might deprive Elizabeth or her lovely older sister Jane of the rich husband necessary to save them from being thrown out of their house when their father dies. When wealthy humanity-lover Mr. Bingley and disdainful Mr. Darcy rent a nearby manor house, Elizabeth’s mother goes crazy with matchmaking fever, jeopardizing Jane’s romance with Bingley and insisting that Elizabeth marry the first man who proposes to her, her unctuous cousin Mr. Collins, a clergyman who has known her for less than a week. After the family’s reputation is ruined by her youngest sister’s seduction by a dashing army officer, can Elizabeth make her way in the adult world, holding true to her principles and marrying the man she passionately loves, or will her family’s prejudices doom her and Jane to an impecunious and regretful spinsterhood?

Okay, okay, I know that was far, far longer than three beats, and you would probably be gasping like a goldfish that tumbled out of its bowl if you attempted to speak it out loud in only three breaths. It IS three sentences, though, by jingo, albeit lengthy ones.

Which, by the way, makes it precisely the kind of pitch that those tutored by conference brochures tend to give. 90% of three-line pitch constructors seem to operate under the assumption that the hearer will be counting the number of periods in the pitch, not the amount of time it takes to say. I’ve seen pitches with seven semicolons and two colons per sentence blithely presented as adhering to the length restriction.

Pull out your hymnals, everyone, and sing along: for a book pitch, the three-sentence guideline is intended to limit the amount of time it will take for the reader to say it, not to demonstrate how much minutiae she can cram into three innocent sentences. If you can say your elevator speech in under 20 seconds and it’s memorable, call it good.

By that measure, the pitch above is perfectly acceptable — that 18 seconds of murmuring you just heard was me double-checking that it could be said quickly enough. But let’s move beyond the brevity that, unfortunately, is usually the only metric aspiring writers apply to a 3-sentence pitch and get down to what actually matters.

Tell me: is this example a successful elevator speech for this book?

If your first impulse was to reply, “Well, I don’t know — did the agent or editor hearing it ask to see pages?”, give yourself seven gold stars; you’ve been paying attention. Pitches do not sell books; writing does. Your goal is to get the hearer to want to READ your writing.

So do you think this is likely to work? To answer, don’t tell me whether you think this is a good elevator speech, or whether you believe it really could be said in three breaths.

Instead, tell me: based upon this pitch alone, would you read this book?

The fact that you probably already have — it’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and anyone who intends to write novels in English should read it to learn a thing or two about timing from its unparalleled mistress — is beside the point here. Even a story that we all know very well indeed can be presented as fresh by focusing on the details that make the story unique.

Would you read this book? is the question you should be asking when you practice your elevator speech upon your kith, kin, and the guy sitting next to you on the subway in the time between now and when you are planning to attend a conference. Why is it so important? Because if the elevator speech doesn’t make the book sound compelling enough to sit down with the first 50 pages or so, it needs work.

Let’s take that elevator speech apart, and see why it grabs the attention. First, it’s clear about both who the protagonist is and what she wants. It establishes the context within which she operates.

“Oh, come on, Anne,” some of you snort, “give us some credit. About whom would the elevator speech be OTHER than the protagonist?”

Laugh if you like, but as a long-time pitching teacher, I can tell you from experience that elevator speeches for novels and memoirs alike frequently focus on what’s going on around the protagonist, rather than what the poor thing is doing. In fact, you’d be surprised (at least I hope you would) at how often elevator speeches focus on everyone BUT the protagonist — it’s far from uncommon for the hearer to be astonished to learn, upon further inquiry, that the daughter mentioned in passing at the end of the second sentence of a paragraph about a troubled father is actually the book’s lead.

“Wait just an agent-tempting minute, Anne,” some of you protest, “the elevator speech you gave for PRIDE & PREJUDICE is mostly about people other than Elizabeth, isn’t it? If the goal here is to present the protagonist as an interesting person in an interesting situation, shouldn’t you have talked only about her?

Actually, the speech above is about her, even though it mentions other people. It depicts her as the central actor in a complicated situation that other quirky characters also inhabit.

How so? Take another gander at the elevator speech, and notice that establishes right away a few important things about our Elizabeth: she is facing internal conflicts (should she embrace her family’s prejudices, or reject them?); she is pursuing a definite goal (making a good marriage without latching herself for life to the first man who finds her attractive), and she faces an array of substantial barriers to achieving that goal (her family members and their many foibles). And it does so with specifics that are delightfully memorable. (No credit to me for that; the specifics are all Aunt Jane’s.)

Still more importantly for introducing Elizabeth as the protagonist, this description also hints that instead of riding the billows of the plot, letting things happen to her, our girl is actively struggling to determine her own destiny. To North American readers, this is going to make her a more attractive protagonist than, say, her sister Jane, whose virtues lie primarily in being nice to everybody and thinking good thoughts while waiting for the man she loves to come to his not very complicated senses.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll no doubt say it again: while polite cheeriness is delightful in person, it’s often deadly dull on the page. Give me an active protagonist to a well-mannered bore any day.

The other reason that this is a good elevator speech is that it alerts the reader to the fact that, despite some pretty serious subject matter, this is a book with strong comic elements — and it does so by SHOWING, not TELLING, that it’s funny. The big give-aways: the absurdity of Mr. Collins’ proposing after only a week, her family members’ odd predilections.

“Okay, okay,” you sigh, “I can see where Aunt Jane might be able to give that pitch successfully. But PRIDE & PREJUDICE is a masterpiece, and I’m just trying to find an agent for an ordinary book, albeit one that I think is well-written. Any tips on how those of us who don’t happen to be comic geniuses might want to go about it?”

Ooh, that’s a great question, but frankly, I’m hesitant to give a precise formula for deriving an elevator speech, lest agents and editors suddenly become inundated with tens of thousands of iterations of it. Like everything else, there are fashions in pitching and querying styles, and I’m not out to set a new one. (Although I have had agents say to me at conferences, “I met three of your pitching students today. They were the only ones who introduced themselves before telling me about their books.” For years, I seem to have been the only coach out there advising it.)

If you really find yourself stumped, however, there is a standard (if old-fashioned) three-step formula that tends to work well. Borrowing a trick from the Hollywood hook, you can compare your book to a VERY well-known book or movie, and build from there.

(1) Name the comparison, and say how your book is similar: “For readers who loved SCHINDLER’S LIST, here is a story about gutsy individuals triumphing against the Nazis.”

(2) Next, add a sentence about who the protagonist is, and what is oppressing her: “Concert pianist Claire’s promising career is cut short when armies invade her beloved Amsterdam, smashing the hall where she played.”

(3) Show the central challenge she faces in escaping that oppression: “But how can she pursue her passion to bring the joys of music to her sightless fiancé Roderick, when every aspect of the world she navigates for him is being swept away before her comparatively perfect eyes?”

This format works for an elevator speech (better than in a pitch proper, as we will see in a few days’ time), because citing another well-known story automatically conjures a backdrop for yours. Basically, you don’t need to fill in as many details.

I just sensed 5,000 hands shooting up in my virtual audience. “But Anne!” these bright souls cry, “didn’t you tell us in a recent post that comparing our books to bestsellers makes ours sound less original and, you know, FRESH?”

Well caught, sharp-witted 5,000: I did in fact say that, and I stand by it as pitch-construction advice. A writer usually is better off weaving her own tale, rather than relying upon the artistic output of others.

Note, however, that I suggested this method for would-be pitchers who are genuinely stuck — or those who are covering already well-worn literary territory. Sometimes, a great book does consist of a fresh twist on much-traveled material. As with a Hollywood hook, this formula enables a writer to capitalize on the very popularity of the subject matter by co-opting it as shorthand.

Or, to put it another way, if your novel is set in Oz, you could use your entire elevator speech explaining what that famous land is like — or you could simply say that it takes place in Oz and use the extra two sentences to show what’s new and fresh about your take on the legendary land.

It’s entirely up to you. But tick, tick. (Or Tick Tock, for those of you familiar with the later books in the Oz series.)

Do bear the freshness problem in mind, however. The real risk of this sort of elevator speech is that from the hearer’s point of view, it’s very easy for the protagonist to get lost in front of that very memorable backdrop. To prevent this horrible fate, you need to provide enough personal specifics to establish your protagonist firmly as — wait for it — an interesting person in an interesting situation.

To pull that off with aplomb, you will need to pepper the elevator speech with specific ways in which you protagonist is different from the one in the old warhorse. As in:

In the tradition of GONE WITH THE WIND, DEVOURED BY THE BREEZE is a stirring epic of one woman’s struggle to keep her family together in a time of war. Magenta O’Sullivan loves Ashby Filks, and he loves her, but when half of her family is killed in the battle of Nearby Field, and the other half falls down an inconveniently placed well, she can no longer be the air-headed girl he’s known since childhood. But will starting her own alpaca farming business to save her family home alienate the only man she has ever loved?

Getting the picture? In an elevator speech, a writer needs first and foremost not to count periods, but to present an interesting, fresh protagonist embroiled in a fascinating conflict — ideally, garnished with a twist that the hearer is not expecting.

Predictability is not pretty, my friends, no matter how you dress it up. At least not in a pitch — and especially not in an elevator speech, where you have so little time to create a good impression. As a result, you’re more likely to catch a pitch-fatigued agent’s attention with the story about the mermaid who can ride a fish than the tale of one who can only swim. (That darned tail!)

The first commandment of a successful elevator speech is, after all, THOU SHALL NOT BORE.

Don’t worry; we’ll be talking at some length about how to avoid that pitfall before I’m through with the elevator pitch. First, however, I shall delve next time into how to construct an elevator speech for a nonfiction book or memoir. Then we’ll be all set to run barefoot through the fields of originality, as well as how and when to give your elevator speech without mortally insulting anybody. Then it’s (gulp!) the pitch proper.

My, it’s quiet out there in the Author! Author! community. I’ve been hearing from some of you prospective pitchers privately — although again, it honestly does make more sense for readers to post questions in the comments here, rather than e-mailing me; that way, not only I am less likely to answer the same question fifteen times in a day, but other curious souls can see the answer — but for the most part, folks have been keeping the comments to a minimum throughout this series. It’s fine just to observe, of course, but I have to say, I am starting to worry that some of you with pitching opportunities coming up might be reluctant to come forward with your concerns and fears.

Call me zany, but it concerns me. It makes me fearful.

Please, if you have questions, ask them — I would much, much rather devote a bit of extra time to responding to comments than have even a single one of you walk into a pitching session unsure what to do. Use a pseudonym in the comments, if you like, but honestly, there’s no shame in feeling insecure. Believe me, you’re not the only prospective pitcher out there overcome with worry; your speaking up might even help someone who is too shy to ask.

Oh, stop groaning — this is where it starts to get exciting. Now that we have the building blocks of the pitch assembled, from here on out, weâ€™re going to be talking about what you should say after the agent of your dreams responds to your magic first hundred words with, â€œWhy, yes, stalwart writer, I would like to hear more about this marvelous book of which you speak. Enlighten me further, humble scribe, and donâ€™t forget to awe me.â€

Okay, so maybe the average Manhattanite agent doesnâ€™t speak like an extra in a production A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM. (Not that anyone in my neck of the woods is dreaming much on these sticky midsummer nights. We had an impromptu block party at 3 am, just because no one could sleep.) The fact remains, if you’ve been following this series and doing your homework, you already have something prepared for that precious moment when someone in the industry turns to you and asks that question so dreaded by aspiring writers, â€œSo what do you write?â€

Now, we’re preparing for that even more fruitful moment when an agent sighs, glances longingly at the pasta bar just a few feet ahead of her, and says, â€œYeah, sure, intrepid writer who has just accosted me while I was spooning wilted green salad onto my plate, you may have 30 seconds of my time. Do you mind if I finish making my way through the buffet first?â€

Moments like this were just made for the elevator speech. Or, if you’re going to be polite about it — and you are, aren’t you, if only to make your mother and me proud? — the moments two minutes after a conversation like this, after the agent in question has had a chance to heap her plate to overflowing and set it down on a nearby table, were just made for this. So are the moments right after an agents’ panel, while you are waiting in line for any of the many, many conference festivities that seem for no apparent reason to require waiting in line, and fifteen minutes after the really nice first-time author with whom you’ve been chatting in that bar that’s never more than 100 yards from any writers’ conference in North America says, “Oh, there’s my agent. Mind if he joins us for a drink?”

Trust me, you will want to be prepared for these moments. Even if you are so terrified of the prospect of pitching that you have promised yourself that you will not utter word one about your manuscript until you have actually shaken hands with the agent with whom you have a scheduled meeting, you’re going to be a much, much happier camper if you have worked up something to say if asked in any context other than a formal pitch session.

Like, say, the entire rest of the conference.

Or, to put it another way: you know those 30 seconds that seemed so short to you when you were trying to compose an elevator speech? The surest means of making them feel eternal is not to have an answer prepared when an agent you have just met socially says, “Mavis, was it? Tell me what you write.”

You’ll be glad then that you took the time to work up an elevator speech, a 3 â€“ 4 sentence description of the protagonist and central conflict of your book, couched in the present tense (for novels and nonfiction about current events) and the past tense (for memoir and nonfiction about the distant past). Regardless of the narrative voice of the work, the elevator should be in the third person (and not waste valuable seconds mentioning the narrative voice of the work) — unless, of course, it is for a memoir, which should be pitched in the first person. As we discussed last time, an elevator speech is not a plot summary, but an introduction to the main character(s) by name, a brief introduction to the challenges s/he faces, and an implied invitation to the listener to ask for more details.

Then — and this is the hardest part for many nervous pitchers — you are going to stop talking. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200, and definitely do not proceed to give your formal 2-minute pitch until that agent asks to hear it.

I’m serious about the invitation part: a 3-sentence elevator speech is not an automatic preamble to a pitch; it is a means of judging a stranger’s interest. Assuming that interest is, in a word, rude. You need to pause in order to allow a well-meaning agent who doesn’t represent your kind of book to tell you that — wait for it — he doesn’t represent your kind of book, and thus it would be a waste of both of your time to continue.

Stop gritting your teeth. An agent’s being willing to tell you that up front is actually a kindness: instead of plowing ahead with a pitch that is doomed from the outset for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the writing quality of your manuscript, you can simply thank the agent and move on. Preferably to another agent who does represent your kind of book.

How does a savvy writer know to do that? Chant it with me now, those of you who have been following Pitchingpalooza from the beginning: it’s simply not worth your time to approach an agent who does not have a solid track record representing books in your category.

Remember, the single most common reason that pitches and queries get rejected is being aimed at the wrong person. There is absolutely nothing a writer can do about a mismatch other than accept gracefully that this is not going to work and move on — because agents specialize, no amount of persuasion is going to convince an agent who habitually represents nothing but memoir that your fantasy novel is the next great bestseller. He’s looking for memoir, period.

But that didn’t address your central fear about giving an elevator speech, did it? “Oh, no, it didn’t, Anne,” those of you quaking in your proverbial boots cry. “I’m not just nervous about an agent’s saying no to me — even the notion of sitting down and trying to…well, not summarize, since you said an elevator speech should not be a summary, but to talk about my book in just a few sentences makes me feel like I’m being invited to waltz on quicksand. I’ve never done anything like this before, and…”

Pardon my interrupting you, boot-quakers, but that last bit probably is not true. If you have ever queried, you actually do have some relevant experience upon which to draw.

How so, you cry, and wherefore? Well, a 3-4 paragraph teaser for a book is typically the second paragraph of a classically-constructed query letter.

That’s not too astonishing, I hope — a pitch is, after all, more or less a verbal query letter. (If anything I’ve said in this paragraph is a major surprise to you, I would strongly advise checking out the mysteriously-titled HOW TO WRITE A REALLY GOOD QUERY LETTER category on the list at right.)

Query letters and elevator speeches often share focus problems. All too often, for instance, the constructors of both will go off on tangents, detailing how difficult it is to find an agent or boasting about how this is the best book ever written. Or how it’s a natural for Oprah, even though Oprah’s book club has been defunct for quite some time now.

Like the descriptive paragraph of a query letter, elevator speeches often get bogged down in plot details. But summarization is not whatâ€™s required, in either instance — and if more aspiring writers realized that, people on both ends of the querying and pitching processes would be significantly happier.

Do I hear some of you out there moaning, or are you merely thinking dissenting thoughts very loudly indeed? â€œBut Anne,” disgruntled pitch- and query-constructors the world over protest, “I spent MONTHS over my query letter, and I never managed to trim the descriptive part to under two-thirds of a page! How do you expect me to be able to make my book sound fascinating in half that many words, and out loud?â€

In a word: strategy. To be followed shortly by a second word, as well as a third and a fourth: practice, practice, and practice. Let’s begin with the strategy.

You can feel a step-by-step list coming on, can’t you? Here goes.

(1) Don’t panic or berate yourself about not coming up with a great pitch the first time you sit down to do it. Oh, you may laugh, but panicking and self-blame are the two most common responses amongst most would-be pitchers confronted with the task of writing a 3-line pitch. That’s not a particularly rational response: contrary to popular belief, the mere fact of having written a good book does not magically endow one with the skills necessary to construct a 3-line pitch.

Like querying, pitching is a learned skill; nobody is born knowing how to do it. So calm down and learn the skills before you start to judge yourself. Give yourself some time to get good at it.

Feeling better? Excellent. Let’s move on to step 2.

(2) Sit down and write a straightforward description of the central conflict or argument of your book. I’m not talking about summarizing the plot here, mind you, but the answer to a very simple, albeit multi-part, question:

a) Who is your protagonist? I’m not just looking for a name here, but characteristics relevant to the story that will make her seem like an interesting person in an interesting situation. Ermintrude is a twenty-seven-year-old North American may well be factually accurate, but you must admit that it’s a heck of a lot less memorable than Wild boar huntress and supermodel Ermintrude is struggling to complete her doctorate in particle physics.

b) What does s/he want more than anything else? If the central conflict of the book is not about this, shouldn’t it be?

c) What’s standing in the way of her getting it?

Easier to think of summing things up when you limit the parameters that way, isn’t it? It also works for memoir:

a) Who is the narrator of this book? And no, “Why, it’s me!” is not a sufficient answer. Show that you are an interesting person in an interesting situation.

b) What did you want more than anything else out of that interesting situation?

c) What was standing in the way of your getting it?

Got those answers firmly in hand? Good. Now let’s mop our perspiring brows and proceed to the next step.

(3) Replace generalities with specifics. Nothing makes a pitch hearerâ€™s eyes glaze over faster than a spate of generalities that might apply to the nearest 100,000 people. Besides, a generalized description usually isn’t particularly accurate, at least on a philosophical level. In a novel or memoir, events do not happen to people in general: they happen to a particular person or group of people with individual quirks. Give a taste of that.

How? By being specific about who your protagonist(s) is (are) and whatâ€™s happening to him/her/it/them. Yes, you’re trying to give an overall sense here, but the less you generalize, the more memorable your protagonist and situation will seem. Ambrose was a florist with a dream is not uninteresting, but let’s face it, Forced into being a florist by his controlling great-uncle, Ambrose dreams daily of becoming a lion tamer is more likely to make you want to read the book.

I know itâ€™s hard in such a short speech, but believe me, a single memorable character trait or situational twist is worth paragraphs and paragraphs of generalities. Mara was an offbeat girl with a problem is significantly less memorable than Mara learned to use her first prosthetic limb when she was three, isn’t it?

Have you obliterated summary and gotten concrete? Great. Now let’s work on making your elevator speech sound original.

(4) Emphasize what is fresh about your story, not its similarities to other books. That loud thumping sound you just heard reverberating throughout the ether was the jaw of every pitcher who has ever said something like, “It’s THE DA VINCI CODE, but with 21rst-century sheep herding instead of multi-century religious conflict!” hitting the floor. Amongst a certain type of pitcher — typically, the type who picked up the idea somewhere that a pitch and a Hollywood hook are the same thing — drawing parallels with a bestseller, any bestseller, regardless of the aptness of the analogy, is downright common.

If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard a pitcher say, “It’s just like BESTSELLER X, but with Twist Y,” I would build a rock-candy mountain just south of Winnipeg and invite all the children in Canada to feast for a month and a half. It’s just not very efficient use of brief elevator speech time; the keynote is a better place to draw such parallels, if you feel you must.

Why isn’t it efficient? The elevator speech is not about indicating genre or book category — which, to someone in the industry, is all citing an earlier successful book in your chosen book category achieves. Besides, once you’ve told an agent or editor what your book category is in your magic first hundred words, referring to a similar book is actually a trifle redundant.

It also makes your book seem less original, at least at the elevator speech stage, where you need to wow your hearers with the uniqueness of your premise, your protagonist, and your approach. Making your book sound like a rehash of a well-worn concept is not usually the best way to accomplish that.

So fine-tune your phraseology. Steer clear of sweeping statements on the order of â€¦and in the process, he learned to be a better axe murderer — and a better human being. Or Their struggles brought them closer together as a couple and won her the mayoral election.

Or, heaven preserve us, Can they learn to live happily ever after?

Remember, you’re trying to convince the hearer that you can write; echoing the latest catchphrase — or one that’s been floating around the zeitgeist for forty years — is generally not the best way to achieve that. Writers often incorporate the sort of terminology used to promote TV shows and movies — but in an elevator speech (or a query letter — or a pitch, for that matter), the last reaction a writer wants to evoke is, â€œGee, this sounds like the movie-of-the-week I saw last night.â€

Is your draft now free of time-worn concepts and wording? Marvelous. Now comes the hard part.

(6) Enliven your account with concrete, juicy details that only you could invent. Include at least one strong, MEMORABLE image. Create a mental picture that your hearer will recall after you walk away, business card and request for the first fifty pages clutched firmly to your heaving bosom. Ideally, this image should be something that the hearer (or our old pal Millicent, the agency screener) has never heard before.

And it neednâ€™t be a visual detail, either: the other senses tend to be seriously under-utilized in elevator speeches. Just makes sure it sticks in the mind.

Yes, in 3-4 sentences. Youâ€™re a writer: making prose interesting is what you DO, right?

Have you come up with an original image, vividly described? Tremendous. Now let’s make your plot sound fascinating.

(7) Present your protagonist as the primary actor in the plot, not as the object of the action. Donâ€™t underestimate the importance of establishing your protagonist as active: believe me, every agent and editor in the biz has heard thousands of pitches about protagonists who are buffeted about by fate, forced by circumstances beyond their control, and are pushed almost unconsciously from event to event not by some interior drive or conflict, but because the plot demands it.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant with me now: â€œBecause the plot requires itâ€ is never a sufficient answer to â€œWhy did that character do that?â€

Stop laughing — you wouldnâ€™t believe how many pitches portray characters who only have things happen to them, rather than characters who do things to deal with challenging situations. If I had a penny for each of those I’ve heard, I’d build three of those rock-candy mountains, one in each of the NAFTA nations, for the delight of local children.

The sad thing is that the books being pitched this way may not actually have passive protagonists. Honestly, though, itâ€™s very easy to get so involved in setting up the premise of the book in an elevator speech that the protagonist can come across as passive, merely caught in the jaws of the plot.

There are a few code words that will let an industry-savvy listener know that your protagonist is fully engaged and passionately pursing the goals assigned to her in the book. They are, in no particular order: love, passion, desire, dream, fate (kismet will do, in a pinch), struggle, loss, and happiness. Any form of these words will do; a gerund or two is fine.

This is recognized code; take advantage of it.

Does your protagonist come across as passionately engaged in the struggle to pursue her dream, embrace her fate, and assure her happiness. Pat yourself on the back. Time to talk about voice.

(8) Make sure that the tone, language, and vocabulary of your elevator speech matches the tone of your book. Youâ€™d be astonished — at least I hope you would — at how often this basic, common-sense principle is overlooked by your garden-variety pitcher. Most elevator speeches and pitches come across as deadly serious.

Oh, you smile incredulously; you think a funny premise speaks for itself, don’t you, and that it does not require a funny presentation? Au contraire. Nothing kills a funny premise faster than a deadpan delivery, just as a hilarious elevator speech for a serious book would make an agent who represents the ultra-serious think twice about asking to see pages.

Don’t believe that the wrong tone can undermine ? Okay, tell me where you would expect to see these two books shelved in a library:

A womanizing, shallow reporter becomes unstuck in time. Forced to repeat the same day over and over again, he loses hope of ever moving on with his life. In the process, he becomes a better man.

A shy woman with a past moves to Brooklyn and falls in love with her wacky neighbor. When a young Southern writer takes up residence in their offbeat apartment house, he can’t believe what he sees going on! Will he be able to win her heart before her boyfriend tires her to death with his high jinks?

Did you recognize either of those stories, devoid of the tones that characterized them? I’m guessing not, although both of these elevator speeches are factually accurate renditions of the stories in question: the first was the comedy GROUNDHOG DAY. The second was the tragedy SOPHIE’S CHOICE.

Make the tone of the elevator speech match the tone of the book. If the book is a steamy romance, let the telling details you include be delightfully sensual; if it is a comic fantasy, show your elves doing something funny. Just make sure that what you give is an accurate taste of what a reader can expect the book as a whole to provide.

(9) Try saying the result out loud to someone who hasn’t read your book, to see how she/he/the lamp in the corner of your office responds. The lamp is a suggestion for those of you too shy to buttonhole a co-worker or that guy sitting next to you at Starbucks, but you see my point, right? You simply cannot know how a pitch is going to sound out loud until you actually say it out loud.

I’m not merely talking about coherence here — I’m also thinking of practicalities like breath control. Is it possible to speak your three-line speech in three breaths, for instance? If not, you’re not going to be able to get through your elevator speech within 30 seconds without fainting.

Oh, you may laugh now, but I’ve seen it happen. Writers just keel over sideways because they forget to breathe.

Remember not to lock your knees. Oh, and write a 3-line pitch that’s possible to say without turning blue.

Be on the look-out, too, for words that are hard to say — or are hard to say together. Tongue-twisters and rhymes may seem cute on the page, but trust me, you’re not going to want to say, Tina Tweezedale tried tremendously to tie Trevor up with twine.

Also, if you’re not ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE how to pronounce a word, do not use it in your elevator speech. Ditto if you aren’t sure that you’re using it correctly. Writers often use words that they’ve never heard spoken aloud; most inveterate readers do. But do you really want the agent to whom you’re pitching to correct your pronunciation of solipsistic, or to tell you that you didn’t actually mean that your protagonist implied something, but that he inferred it?

Check. Double-check. And if you’re still not certain, track down the best-read person you know and ask her to hear your pitch. And to define solipsistic, while she’s at it.

I sense some furrowed brows out there. “Okay, Anne,” some perplexed souls murmur, “I get why I might want to make sure that I can say my entire elevator speech out loud correctly. But if I’m sure that I can, why do I need to say it to — ugh — another living, breathing human being?”

For a couple of very good reasons, shy brow-knitters. First, you’re going to have to say it out loud eventually; it’s literally impossible to give a verbal pitch silently. All saving your elevator speech for the great moment when you are face-to-face with the agent of your dreams actually achieves is depriving you of the opportunity to practice.

Or, to put it less obliquely: if your elevator speech doesn’t make sense aloud, would you rather find that out in the midst of giving the pitch to the agent of your dreams, or a few days before, when you still have time to fix it?

I thought as much. Second, if you’ve never pitched before, saying your 3-line pitch is going to sound ridiculous to you the first few times you do it. That’s just the nature of the beast.

Again, would you rather feel silly while you’re pitching to an agent, or days/weeks/months before?

Third — and this is the most important — if you practice on a reasonably intelligent hearer, you can ask a vitally important follow-up question: “Would you mind telling the story back to me?”

If s/he can’t, you might want to take another gander at your elevator speech. Chances are, it’s not particularly memorable.

I’m itching to give a few concrete examples of these principles in action, but that’s a task for another day — like, say, tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

As I may perhaps have mentioned 40 or 50 times throughout the course of this series, the common conception of what a conference pitch should be — three sentences, no more, no less, preferably fired off in a single breath — and what actually occurs in pitch meetings tend to be rather at odds. Even at writers’ conferences where the organizers tell attendees point-blank that if there’s a fourth period in their pitches, no one will still be listening, agents and editors generally expect writers to be able to have actual conversations about their work, not merely to cough up a few rigid memorized lines.

In deference to that reality, and because many first-time pitchers’ greatest fear is freezing up and not being able to say anything at all, I have been devoting much of Pitchingpalooza to helping you become not only a good pitcher, but a writer who sounds professional when discussing her work. That way, no matter what the agent or editor in front of you expects, you will be able to roll with the proverbial punches.

I’m quite aware, though, that sometimes, conference brochure rhetoric can scare prospective pitchers into conniption fits. I must conclude, therefore, that at least some you reading this will be perusing this series in panicky haste, searching frantically at the last minute for a quick how-to for cramming a 400-page novel’s complexities into three short sentences.

You have found it, panicky searchers. Today, I am devoting this entire post to the construction and use of the 3-line pitch.

That does not mean, however, that I’m simply going to hand you a one-size-fits-all formula; generic pitches, like boilerplate query letters, are boring. Instead, we’re going to be talking about how to figure out the best way to present your ideas in this super-brief format. And in order to maximize the number of contexts in which you will be able to use this 3-sentence wonder, I shall also be talking about the 3-sentence elevator speech.

Oh, don’t cringe; I’m not saying that you must buttonhole an agent in an elevator (although you would be astonished at how many elevator speeches are indeed given whilst traveling between the floors of a conference center); it’s merely shorthand for a quick chance encounter turned promotional opportunity. That chance could crop up anywhere on the conference’s grounds, even in that bar that’s never more than a hundred yards from any writers’ conference in North America.

But don’t get antsy if you’re shy: you don’t ever need to say these words out loud at all, if you prefer to promote your work in writing: the species of elevator speech I have in mind is equally useful at conferences and in query letters.

Were you expecting me to follow that last statement with not at all? I can see where you might leap to that conclusion: I have, after all, spent the last couple of weeks telling you at great length that 3-sentence speeches are vastly overrated as marketing tools for books. Which they are, in most pitching contexts. Sometimes, though, an elevator speech is just the ticket; over the next couple of posts, I shall be showing you when and how.

So I would, contrary to what you may have been expecting, advise you to construct one prior to conference time. It’s just not going to be the primary pitching tool in your writer’s bag.

Let’s begin with a definition of the three-line pitch, or, as I prefer to call it, the elevator speech. Simply put, an elevator speech is a 3 – 4 sentence description of the protagonist and central conflict of your book. Contrary to popular belief, the elevator speech should not be a plot summary. Instead, it is an introduction to the main character(s) — by name, please; they’re more memorable that way — the challenges s/he is facing, and what’s at stake.

An elevator speech is a longish paragraph about your book’s premise, in other words, not its plot. Much less threatening if you think of it that way, isn’t it?

How should this brief introduction to your premise be phrased? If the book in question is a novel, the elevator speech should be in the present tense and in the third person regardless of the tense and narrative voice in which the book is actually written. If you have written a memoir, the past tense and the first person are appropriate.

Does that forest of hands waving in the air indicate that someone out there has a question? “Anne, I’m confused. The definition above sounds a heck of a lot like what the conference website before me seems to think I should be saying in a 2-minute pitch. What’s the difference between an elevator speech and a pitch?”

I don’t blame you for being a tad puzzled; there’s quite a bit of pitching advice floating around out there that makes no distinction whatsoever between the two. But they are not the same thing: while an elevator speech is a pitch, not all pitches are elevator speeches. Nor should they be.

Yes, you read that last bit correctly: the 3-sentence pitch you’ve been hearing so much about in conference circles lately is not a standard pitch for a book. It isn’t intended to replace the fully-realized 2-minute pitch that agents and editors will expect you to deliver within the context of a formal appointment. Like the keynote, the 3-line pitch not a substitute for a pitch proper, but a teaser for it — it’s the lead-in to the actual pitch, a chance to show off your storytelling talent in the 30 seconds you might realistically have with an agent in a hallway.

Thus the term elevator speech: it’s designed to be short enough to deliver between floors when a happy accident places you and the agent of your dreams together in the same lift. Although often, an agent in a hurry — say, one you have caught immediately after he has taught a class, or on his way into lunch — will not wait to hear the 2-minute version before asking to see pages.

Which is the true mark of success for an elevator speech: it so intrigues the hearer that further pitching is rendered unnecessary. But don’t get your hopes up: for a formal pitching session, you will be better off with a 2-minute formal pitch. (And don’t worry, I’ll be getting to that next week.)

But — and I cannot emphasize this enough — contrary to what the vast majority of pitching classes and conference brochures will tell you, the elevator speech does not work in every context: it should be reserved for informal pitching opportunities. And even then, you should ALWAYS ask politely if it’s okay to pitch before uttering so much as a syllable of it.

“Wait just a minute,” I hear some time-strapped neophyte conference-goers protest. “You’re telling me to do twice the work I would normally need to do! The conference brochure I have in my hand tells me that I MUST give a 3-4 sentence summary of my book. Obviously, then, I can just stick with that, and ignore your advice to prepare a 2-minute pitch as well. Besides, won’t agents and editors get mad at me if I break the 3-sentence rule?”

In a word, no.

At least, not in a scheduled pitch meeting, for the exceedingly simple reason that it’s not their rule. Almost invariably, conference organizers, not the potential pitch-hearers, set up the 3-sentence maximum. There’s a reason for that: the 3-sentence pitch is not the standard of the publishing industry, but the movie industry; agents seldom have much attachment to it.

I still feel some of you out there quailing, however. Here’s something to make you feel better: even at conferences where organizers are most adamant about brevity, it’s a guideline, not a hard-and-fast rule. It’s not as though goons with stopwatches will be standing behind you during your pitch appointments, shouting, “Okay, buddy — that was 3.5 sentences. Out of the pitching pool!”

Oh, sure, if you went on for two or three minutes during a chance encounter over the dessert bar, the average agent’s plate of tiramisu might start to shake with annoyance after a minute or so. That’s a matter of context and fallen blood sugar, though. In the formal appointments, agents are often actually perplexed when writers stop talking after 20 seconds or so.

Because, you see, they don’t read the conference brochures. They just know the norms of the publishing world.

But think about it: do you really want to waste the other 9 1/2 minutes of your appointment by having prepared only 30 seconds about your book? On the other hand, you don’t want to focus so much on the 2-minute formal pitch that you can’t take advantage of hallway pitching opportunities, do you?

In short, you’re going to want to prepare both. This is an industry that values flexibility and creativity, after all.

Did that gusty collective sigh I just heard mean that I’ve convinced at least a few of you? “Okay, Anne,” some of you shout wearily, “You win. But since brevity is the soul of both the elevator speech and the keynote, how are they different?”

Good question, tuckered-out would-be pitchers. The elevator speech is roughly three times the length of the keynote, for one thing. And while the keynote is designed to pique interest in the conflict, the elevator speech is intended to elicit a “Gee, that sounds like a fascinating story — I want to hear more.”

Although the purpose of both the keynote and the 3-line pitch is to whet the literary appetite of the hearer, to get her to ask for more information about the book, the keynote can hit only one major theme. It’s only a sentence, after all. In the elevator speech, however, your task is to show that your novel or memoir is about an interesting protagonist in a fascinating situation — or, if it’s nonfiction, that it’s about an interesting, important problem with a fascinating solution.

Let me repeat that, slightly twisted, because it’s important: if your elevator speech does not present your novel or memoir’s protagonist as a scintillating person caught in a riveting dilemma, or at any rate shown against an absorbing backdrop, you should revise it until it does. Ditto if your nonfiction elevator speech doesn’t make the underlying problem sound vital to solve and interesting to read about solving.

Your elevator speech should establish book’s premise, main character, and primary conflict — and that’s it. For a novel or memoir, it should answer the basic questions:

(1) Who is the protagonist/are you?

(2) What is the problem she/he/you are facing?

(3) How is she/he/you going to attack it differently than anybody else on the face of the earth?

Why stick to the premise alone, you ask? Simple: when you have someone’s attention for only thirty seconds or so, you don’t have time to explain the interesting backstory, the macabre subplot, how the plot’s major conflicts are resolved, that great twist about the long-lost half-sister, or how the villain gets dissolved in a vat of acid in the basement.

You will not, in short, have the time to summarize the plot. You will have barely enough to identify the two or three primary elements and raise interest in your hearer’s mind about how you might resolve them on the page.

Was that giant slide-whistle I just heard the sound of all of you who have experienced the horror of trying to cram an entire book’s plot into three sentences realizing that you didn’t need to do it at all?

Yup. I wish someone had told me that before the first time I pitched, too. To tell you the truth, the only people I have ever met who have expected writers to tell an entire story in three lines are pitching teachers and the conference organizers who write the directions in brochures.

Out comes the broken record again: an elevator speech should not be a summary; you will drive yourself completely nuts if you try to summarize hundreds of pages of plot or argument in just a few lines.

Oh, I see: that is precisely what you have been trying to do, isn’t it? No wonder you’re stressed about pitching.

So why is the demand that you limit yourself to three sentences so ubiquitous in conference literature? Beats me. And what makes this phenomenon even stranger, at least from my perspective, is even screenplays are not really pitched in three sentences; they’re pitched in three beats. So what book writers are being told to do is not even accurate for the industry in which micro-pitches are the norm.

Curious about what three beats might sound like? I’m no screenwriter (nor do I play one on TV), but let me give it a try for one of the longest movies of my lifetime:

Beat one: An East Indian lawyer in South Africa

Beat two: uses nonviolence to change unjust laws

Beat three: and then takes the strategy home to fight British rule.

Recognize it? It’s GANDHI. (In case you think I’m kidding about the expected brevity of movie pitches, here is the IMDb version: “Biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the lawyer who became the famed leader of the Indian revolts against the British through his philosophy of non-violent protest.” Mine’s shorter.)

Of course, far more happens in the movie than this: it’s 188 minutes long, and it has a cast of — well, if not thousands, at least many hundreds filmed repeatedly. But if I had tried to summarize the entire plot, we would have been here until next Tuesday.

Fortunately, an elevator speech for a book is not expected to be this terse: you actually can have 3-4 complex sentences, not just beats. But that does not mean, as is VERY common in the ostensibly 3-sentence pitches one actually hears at conferences in these dark days, three sentences with eight dependent and three independent clauses each.

So don’t get your hopes up, rules-lawyers. We’re not talking a page of description here; we’re talking a paragraph.

Unfortunately, that’s a necessary admonition. I’ve heard many elevator speeches that — while technically three sentences in the sense that they contained only three periods — took longer than two minutes to say out loud. While that may meet the letter of the 3-sentence rule, it clearly violates its spirit.

Stop glaring at me. I don’t make the rules; I merely explain them to you fine people.

Remember, the point in keeping it brief is TO KEEP IT BRIEF, not to satisfy some esoteric punctuation requirement. How brief is brief, you ask? Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you can’t say your entire elevator speech within the space of two regular breaths, it’s too long.

Are you wondering how you’re going to accomplish this level of pith? Are you contemplating taking up fancy yogi breathing techniques to extend the length of your elevator speech? Are you, in fact, seriously considering avoiding hallway pitches altogether, just so you don’t have to construct both an elevator speech and a 2-minute pitch?

All three are common reactions to my pitching classes I must confess, but don’t worry — I shall give you many, many practical tips on how to pull it off with aplomb, but for now, I’m going to let those of you who are attending the Conference That Shall Not Be Named get back to your frantic pre-conference preparations.

For those of you who have not attended before, you might want to channel some of that anticipatory energy you’ve been devoting to nail-biting to taking a gander at the reader-requested WHAT TO WEAR TO A CONFERENCE and WHAT TO BRING TO A CONFERENCE categories on the archive list at right. Also, if you love me, please do not even consider sending off any requested materials to any agents and editors you might meet at said conference without at least glancing at the HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A SUBMISSION PACKET posts.

And is it too late to advise you to read your manuscript IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN HARD COPY, and OUT LOUD before you send it to anyone? Or to remind you that no matter how thrilled you are to receive a request for pages from a real, live agent, unless that agent actually asked you to overnight it (very rare, but it happens), you are under no obligation to send requested materials right away. You have time to take a day, a week, or even a month to get those pages submission-perfect.

For the rest of you, I leave to ponder the possibilities until next time. Brainstorm about the best way to present your premise BRIEFLY, not how to cram as many plot points as possible into a couple of breaths’ worth of speech.

To give you a touch of additional incentive, I’ll let you in on a secret: once you have come up with an eyebrow-raising elevator speech, the process is going to help you improve your 2-minute pitch — and your queries, too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again, amn’t I? Tune in tomorrow, and keep up the good work!